I’m writing this a few days early, since I have a short “breather” to get some documentation and clerical work done — with hopes I can just sit down and code in the next few days before July ends. July was a slow month for RPG Architect, since I was out with the flu for a week and I have an increased role of “dad” with my third kiddo being born at the end of June, as well a significant personal milestone (which y’all might be able to figure out based on the one day sale that occurred). That said, a few things have been updated and changed, so let’s get started!
Shadows got some much needed love, while I was investigating another big with hue-shifts. Due to this, you’ll see that shadows (the above is zoomed in significantly to enhance the effect) actually anti-alias significantly better.
The formula editor also got a large upgrade. I’ve moved forward to using an independently built package, rather than rolling my own. The package itself is used in numerous code editors out there — and my desire to transition to using it (also to avoid having to handle bugs on my own implementation) has some other motives. Part of my planning for this is to eventually also add in the ability to write your scripting/commands out via typing, for those who don’t want visual commands. It’ll hopefully be seamless and work in a WYSIWYG kind of manner that you see in some HTML editors. I have the details/plans for it on the drawing board, but haven’t executed on it due to a lack of time.
I updated how all of the “Tables” work, wherein random chances occur (e.g. Enemy Encounters, Loot, Enemy Formations) with a major refactor. They are technically all procedural and leverage a “seed,” which you’ll see if you want to preview an Enemy Formation in the Editor. This will let you potentially create the same encounters or save the same “results” of a table.
They all operate and execute on their own “engine” now, so-to-say, which can be reused. The benefit of this is that now anything that might leverage this (there are a number of ideas, like using Loot Tables for Shops, Enemy Battle Programs thru Tables, etc) will be much faster now, since it leverages the same programming stack. What might have taken eight to ten hours before will probably take two to three — per feature. I may get a few of the aforementioned “Tables” added in the next few days (which will technically still be in July), but I’ll probably be writing about it in August’s update.
I made an update to allow you to alter Battle Commands as well — so you can potentially change the name of a Skill/Battle Command, change the Use Scope, etc. Some of this is still a work in progress and has bugs, which should hopefully be finished before the end of the month.
A number of bug-fixes have been made. The User Interface editor had numerous changes made, as have some of the controls/movement-handling. Hue-shift was not honored before, but it is now. Use Skill had a few minor bugs that were not addressed. A number of feature requests from the Discord were also added, such as adding Easing Functions to some of the Commands. You can also adjust how much your Battle Counter will “adjust” by after an action (if you specify a value to alter it by as part of the User Effects, it will leverage that, rather than reset to 0). You can now use Ctrl and the Mouse Wheel to scroll thru layers in the map editor as well.
For August — I expect it’ll realistically be almost as slow as July. More life changes incoming and me trying to get back into the swing of things professionally. September will hopefully be a better month in terms of updates. Regardless, August should hopefully continue to have more Battle system updates. Some of the items in the Roadmap don’t make a whole lot of sense to “keep” anymore (multi-select may not be a thing until post 1.0, since it’s a LARGE update). The remainder of THAT work is probably about one work week, which means we’re very close to 1.0.
That said, I don’t want to “officially” exit Early Access, since there has been a good deal of confusion for new users — and this process needs to be improved. There were numerous things I thought were clear and obvious, but had numerous users request/ask the same question, which indicates that it is not as such. The “new user” wizard will likely be getting another big overhaul before release. I also intend on finishing/updating all of the documentation (and adding, most likely, more debugging/logging), in addition to the “1.0 Game.” Lots of things to do and I’m stretched a bit thin, but doing what I can.
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!
