March was a bit slow, as predicted. There were quite a few things that have taken priority in my personal life, so this was to be expected.
The biggest update was finally adding Seraph Circle Animations for spells and the like. There will be more to come as part of the standard RPG Architect resource package. These are allowed to be used in any RPG Architect-created game.
There was an error found in the flood-fill tool with erasing things, which made me rethink how we leverage flood-fill in general. While working through fixing the bug, I found a way to optimize it… so I did! The operation will now be roughly 20-30% faster, which may not seem like much, but when you have a large 1,000 x 1,000 map, that can equate to a few seconds. Without the optimizations, I was running around 45 seconds, and after, I was below 40 seconds (one iteration had it down to 30 seconds, but I think that’s an anomaly). Again, this is for a large map wherein you’re essentially doing 1,000,000 operations (1,000 x 1,000) and having to check neighboring tiles for terraformation, etc. Without optimizations and multi-core processing, this operation (I tried, just to verify) takes over 12 minutes.
One of our long-time users had requested support for plugins — so I spent some time reworking that. Plugins are now “supported,” but not documented. Given that RPG Architect is rapidly changing, it’s not a good idea (at the moment) to really build them. Also, it’s important to note that if something is popular and useful, it might as well be a first-party (re: no plugin required) feature. However, for people who are trying to fill the gaps in the meantime and/or want to do something truly unique, the ability to do such is there, now. I promise I’ll eventually make a proper video on how to do this, as well as instructions.
Save States, prior, didn’t track any details about the scene, such as weather playing, pictures showing up, and so forth. I’ve updated it now, such that these persist in between saves. There were a number of folks who had to do pre and post-processing to handle weather, for instance, which is now no longer required. This will hopefully help things out.
There were a number of smaller bug-fixes and feature updates that aren’t worth posting here, but they can be found on the Steam release notes.
I’ve been busy re-working Physics again. I had tried Jolt a while back, and it wasn’t working. Bepu still appears to be the “best” solution for us. I’ll write a bit about that. I was trying to import the Character Controller that is included in it, since it manages everything, but as I worked through it, it looked like it was mostly doing some of the same things that we already do. I presently have my implementation of it commented out (it isn’t working, also), but am trying to follow the pathways the code has to manage/construct the appropriate constraints in movement. If you’ve noticed that the movement can be a little strange, or jumping near a wall lets you literally fly up, then you’ve encountered some of the issues that are present. In 2D mode, you’ll likely never see it. In 3D mode, you’ll see it if you try adding platforming and a lot of ramps with higher speeds. The goal is to mitigate the last edge cases and keep it clean. I’m getting there. I’ve been spending (unfortunately) a lot of time trying to figure it out, though, which has slowed down some updates.
In regard to my last personal updates… I successfully passed my Phase C certification in Krav Maga, making me graduate to a bona fide instructor. I had failed last year’s certification (for Phase B), but managed to double-promote (and was given my Phase B promotion after two days in of the seven). It was an incredible experience and I highly recommend Phase training to anyone serious about Krav Maga or self-defense. Aside from that, despite having Xenoblade Chronicles X, I’ve only put about 12 hours into it, because I’m trying to get RPG Architect into a better place for everyone who uses it. I may take a longer break to play when I “should” be working on the 1.0 game, but we’ll see — it might just be a game that I do a slow burn on and let people spoil me on in regards to the additional content.
Next month will focus on getting Physics in a good place, and then working through some requests (and prior plans) for the User Interface. Aside from some Battle Programming updates and Loot Tables/Rewards, we’re basically at 1.0 (everything else is very small on the roadmap).
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!
