Another month, more work done, but not as much as I ever want. That’s kind of the way development goes, sometimes. Let’s get started.
This month ended up having a lot of quality of life features added, but very few of them ended up being something on the “Roadmap,” so we’re in roughly the same place (as of this writing — I’m starting a week early, because I have a bit of time free now, and I’m not sure any of the other updates I want will get in, in time).
I had promised Battle Logs last month… and I got them in. There was a lot of rework involved, but it will hopefully help some folks who had previously been manually doing them. I’m considering adding a few more “toggles” on them, but for now, we’re pretty solid.
A big quality of life update is that you can now render 3D meshes (and) objects in the editor. It’ll cache them as you update them and project them as an image. The quality may leave something to be desired, since it does “super-impose” them into a 2D layer, and we effectively are going to sample them to one size, which gets scaled on zoom. It’s hidden behind an Editor Setting (since it can be VRAM/RAM intensive), “Render Mesh Layers” and “Render Mesh Objects.” You can also control how “nicely” they render.
A lot of folks had been asking for this since I added mesh support for layers last month, so it took a bit of priority. I figure, if I’m already working in this spot, I might as well try to make it a bit more “feature complete.” So, that’s why it moved up a bit in priority.
(array vid)
I also added arrays as a data type for variables! You’ll need to use the “new” Array Operations command to manipulate and leverage them. There are a few Data Manipulators for Arrays as well (under the Variable Manipulation command), which give you some powerful ways to interact with the Arrays.
In addition, a number of Data Sources (via the Save Value command) were updated to now have Arrays in them as well! I added roughly 30-40 new properties overall and revamped even more. This should hopefully help with some folks’ requests around Battle system enhancements.
There were a number of bug fixes made. I think in total, there were about 60 bug-fixes both in-engine and in the editor. Things like Sky Spheres not rendering correctly in Orthographic Projections, as well as Localized String’s in User Interfaces have both been fixed. The editor had a number of spots where things weren’t saving (the User Interface editor), due to my own silly copy/paste errors between Element types. Everything is becoming a bit more clean.
As a “secret side project,” a few community members (and myself) have been migrating over the existing wiki to a new site and giving it a much-needed overhaul. The new site is built off of some of the very hard work that Aezrin and Noobk had put into trying to get a “new” idea for what the wiki could look like. Those two spent countless hours of their own free time to build something better, and I’m trying to leverage the formatting of it to make something that is every bit as “technical” as what we have now, but to actually provide useful samples and examples within it. When it’s “done,” it should double as the actual “manual” and I’ll try to export as a PDF to ship with RPG Architect.
May ended up being very busy for me, professionally and outside. I tend to be quiet about my family life, but baby number three is due at the end of June and we’ve been trying to get prepared around the house. Funny to think that baby number one was what got me back into game-making, and I’m trying to wrap up “work” on 1.0 by the time a third child (the last one, I promise) arrives. It’s very likely I won’t finish all of the 1.0 features by June — I anticipate running into as late as September, honestly. It may be another year before we get to an official 1.0, but the “feature complete” 1.0 will be coming out by the end of this year, for sure. I just want to make sure that I can make a game with the engine and make any improvements that may be needed (and/or bug fixes).
Behind the scenes, I’ve already started working on enhancements for tactical combat and things that will be coming post 1.0. I try to do what I can, where I can. It may be that TRPG combat comes literally a quarter after 1.0 is official, at this rate.
June will have a focus on battle improvements, e.g. multiple hits (as requested and reported last month), as well as some battle transition logic. I’ll follow that up with some “selected” effects for different Lists. After that, it’s really only a few more (small) things that will get us to the 1.0 milestone.
That’s a wrap for May! There has been a lot of lateral progress, but not as much forward progress as I had hoped for. It’ll pay off later, though, when things move faster!
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!
