Welcome to another wrap-up — with a predictable amount of “what got done” and “what didn’t get done” according to last month. Let’s dive in!
Out the door, we got a new “New Project” wizard. It is a little more inquisitive and helps guide you thru creating a new project. It does a lot more than just add “new paint” to an old feature — it actually adds something useful and new. In this editor, you’ll actually have the ability to “upscale” resources. For example, if a Template is made at a 16 pixel tile resolution and you choose a 32 pixel tile resolution when creating your project, the editor will now scale resources up for you automatically. This ALSO works with resource packs. This should help a lot of newcomers and really should have been a feature from the get-go, but it has been low on the priority list with other features being more important. It’s in now! The evolution of this, as well as the new “Launch Pad” (replacing the Splash Screen) should now be 1.0-ready.
I reworked the pipeline as well to allow for more transition types, most of which nobody will see immediately. This came with the addition of a “Zoom” transition that will zoom a scene (or UI) in/out.
There was also a lot of work done to rewrite the engine from a gravity-agnostic perspective, to further help non-standard development paths (e.g. our 2D Platformer series). This was really meant to address bugs and issues where we were always hard-coded in Physics to make “down” in the format of a negative Y-axis. It’s still not going to be perfect (and I suspect it might not ever “truly” be, because we’re not a 2D or a Platformer engine), but it should help a lot with edge cases for ramps, etc.
The real work was in bug fixes… I think there are around a hundred or so of them, spread out across RPG Architect in the editor and engine — such as how behavior was for local reference variable/switches, terraforming tiles on other layers, weird AvaloniaUI edge cases (from our upgrade to 12), as well as how the engine handled things, like status effects on equipment and items, passengers in caterpillar mode, and even asynchronous calls from Global Scripts. There were a LOT of bug fixes — too numerous to name! But if you’re on Discord, you’ve hopefully seen them get fixed mostly, relatively fast. Also, you can now open a RPG Architect “.project” file with “Open With” on Windows (and likely other OS’s).
The 1.0 project had some work — not as much as I’d have liked. I have statistics all mapped out, curves, and characters created. I still need to map out some enemies as well, skills, and the like. That’ll be my “July” aim. I’ve been making some progress towards it, but it’s still not where I’d like. I got hit with an unexpected work trip at the end of the month, so that effectively took a week out of my typical capacity.
That’s it for June! We are moving forward and improving! The 1.0 “release date” of early Q4 is very unlikely to be hit, but I AM still hoping to get us to 1.0 by the end of the year. Only time will tell, but progress is being made every day, even if it’s just a proverbial grain of sand at a time.
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!
