Another month, another update. This was another Quality of Life month, with a lot of “scripting” options being opened up.
October was filled with tons of quality of life features and things that were requested in the Discord (if you’re not there, you should be — it’s a great way to get your voice heard and interact with the community). Script and Variable/Switch notifiers are now placed everywhere in the editor, such that you’ll get a visual notification that something actually has data. In the image below, you’ll see the notifier on the Switches and Variables, as well as the Loaded script, and Execute/Item Focused scripts inside the Template List.
Items and Skills now support “Growth” traits, such that using a Skill or Item might increase your experience for that skill (or in general). It’s something simple, but something that is also useful.
Since we have a number of users working through battle systems, they got a little more love. One of the bigger updates is that you can now have a script that will execute before or after a scheduled action — such that you could handle “interesting” states (e.g. Final Attack materia, Prevent Death [Life 3], etc), which will happen before it tries to parse “Victory” or “Defeat” conditions.
Tile Tags also got an upgrade — they now have a script handler! You can create a script that will run for your tile tags when they enter, exit, or while someone is currently on it. It can also play sound effects as you walk on it by default.
There is an “official” Russian translation of RPG Architect now, in distribution. It is not complete by any regard, but it’s “better” than it was before. I updated a few of the parsers and scanners that I had, so more translations can come (soon). If anyone is interested, definitely hit me up and I can get a “full” list of the keys that would need to be parsed.
Another Quality of Life feature that has been asked for (for quite a while) is a “master” list of everything on a map, in terms of Entities, Doodads, etc. Now, you’ll be able to check out each of these in their respective categories and modes.
We’re now 70% of the way to 1.0, since last month. A lot of the remaining items are very low-hanging fruit that I could knock out in a day or two. I’m not 100% sure that I will still have 1.0 out by the end of the year (and it would be fun to have it “release” on RPG Architect’s two year anniversary on Steam), but it’ll be “ready” when it’s ready. I’m in no rush for the “official” release and I’d be plenty happy keeping it pre-1.0 for a long enough period to make sure everything is ironed out. There are still some fundamental bugs and crashes that occur where I’m not expecting them (some justified and some unjustified). The goal of RPG Architect has always been to give the user nearly full control over the engine, and with that, you have the potential to break the engine. The goal is to prevent that as much as possible, but some “bad” actions cannot be helped.
There were a number of bug fixes made on things like sliders, the new “jump” command (and physics, eek!), as well as pathfinding. It’s not all perfect, but it’s getting more refined with each release and as each user touches the engine in new ways.
November will be full of more work towards 1.0, with a few “added” features (and likely bug fixes) as we proceed onward! I’d like to potentially get in some QoL features for the battle system and potentially start working on allowing for some localizations to be setup inside the engine (meaning you can create multiple languages). This will be a significantly large update, if it is done — and it’ll hit many parts of the engine. I’ve already seen a few requests for things that need to be done in the battle, so those will be coming soon.
That’s it for October!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
