July was a difficult month. About a week in, my primary machine died. There’s a reason that this post is so late. I’ve spent the last (nearly) four weeks trying to achieve a solution with Dell/Alienware, to no avail. So, the updates this month are rather light — and I apologize for that.
Controller support was added this month. RPG Architect has a “particular” button order/configuration it expects. In most cases, the buttons should be where you expect them (e.g. the A button on an Xbox controller and the Nintendo Switch Pro controller are in different locations, but both map to the RPG Architect “A” button). However, in the case that they do not, you can manually remap them in the database for your controller type. In most cases, it should be as simple as going to your Virtual Key Mapping and adding the “Gamepad” and respective key/axis/etc. It should “just work.”
I spent some time on the backend of things, since doing anything with performance on the front was difficult. I’ve added “more” logging into the editor/engine. You can enable it under the “Debugging Settings” under the Editor Settings. In the future, this is likely to expand to let you set the different level of logging (and perhaps a method of seeing/streaming the messages to the editor). Most of the logging revolves around the “Save Value” command, because that can be a difficult one to interact with. If the setting is enabled, the Engine.log will now include whether or not certain things are found, if values are good/bad, and so forth. Hopefully, this will make things a little “easier” to diagnose.
A large portion of time has been spent on improving Pathfinding. Our community member, Aezrin, continued to work with me on finding the various shortcomings of our existing pathfinding. At this point, pathfinding should (just about) be ready for primetime and ready for the 1.0 release. There are still a few small items I’d like to adjust in it (such as allowing for diagonal movement). However, it navigates much better, more directly, and handles different situations very well. We’re close!
I also added Elementals into the database, under the Statistics category. Elementals will allow post-processing to formula calculations, such that Fire could have a weakness to Water, and so forth. Unfortunately, no post-processing is done yet. It’ll be coming in August, sometime.
I also worked on rewriting the user interfaces for the User Interface section — everything has been reorganized and generally leverages tabs, as part of our “newer” design language that is testing better with our users.
As usual, a number of bug fixes were made and minor enhancements to other systems that are otherwise undocumented (such as some issues with Animations, usability in the editor, etc).
Next month (or rather this month, at this point), I’ll be wrapping up work on Pathfinding and Elementals. There will likely be more usability updates, hopefully related to scripting. The goal at the moment is to continue working through the roadmap for 1.0, as well as addressing a few requests in the Discord. A sideview battle system template is on the way very soon (or it may be out by the time this update is published), with a dungeon-crawler template starting progress.
That’s it for July!
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!
