New development

Version 0.7 contained many improvements with the YASC compiler and some minor improvements in the engine and Crafter Workshop. For the next release many new features are planned for both the Crafter Workshop to improve the usability and experience of it. In this post I will shed some light on the on-going developments that are taking place or have been done already for version 0.8.

Done this, done that..

In the past month I gave quite some development love to the Crafter Workshop as I felt it needed more functionality to make it really usable for the creation of a game. Features that have been added are improved project management, including building all resources and launching the game. During the build process all scripts are compiled and the c2d files are generated. Any errors that occur are displayed in a new Output panel. Script errors are click-able bringing you to the line in the source file where the error has been detected!

In the tile view the most notable change is the completely rewritten tile selection widget. More tiles are now visible in one view without having to scroll each time to find the next one. More intelligence will be added in later stages like skipping tiles that are part of an animation sequence. Besides this widget it is now also possible to draw tiles while keeping the mouse button down. This simplifies filling bigger area's with the same tiles. Like you would expect, the undo & redo functionality have been restored and improved allowing you to undo and redo your work.

The script view has gotten slightly less love. Most notable here is the new bar at the left side showing the line numbers. Further I fixed some bugs in the syntax highlighter and as stated above added better error handling.

In progress

As usual I am working on many things at the same time. Each of these systems are cool and it is difficult to split my time between them. Currently I am working on:

• D3D text rendering: currently it is not possible to draw text which is a huge drawback. So, I am spending a huge part of the time on implementing a new text renderer for the engine that supports both OpenGL and DirectX.
• A brand new UI system: another huge drawback is the lack of a UI system in this engine. All games have a UI so this functionality must be present in this engine. I base my work on the hard work of the guys at CeGUI and some parts of XAML of Microsoft.
• Reviving the particle system: some versions ago the particle system implementation got broken and it is time to revive it. A game without particle effects can be great, but with them is nicer! It is being extend with powerful tools to create stunning visuals.

Obviously all this is way to much work and if I would wait with releasing the next version till all of this is finished you would have to wait a couple of years. This of course is not the plan. Thus each upcoming version will have new features added to these systems. You can help me by letting me know what features you need so I can spend time on those!

As I noticed some bugs and inconceivabilities (no idea if that is actually a word) that I decided to bring out version 0.8 earlier than planned. This means that somewhere near the end of this month it will probably released!