Just wanted to let you guys know how things are going.
The map/entity system is in, and the map format version 1 is finalized. We began porting Sully Chronicles last week, and so we have been in a 'user' mindset lately which is of course pretty different from a dev mindset. Its been quite handy, I have found numerous things that needed to be added and were simply overlooked: for instance, in maped, there was no way to view the tile INDEX of a given tile, which made it hard to figure out the correct values to pass to SetTile() when dynamically changing a map in VC. Since V1 VC is quite different than V3 VC, the code can't just be copy/pasted, but again, the process of rewriting and porting the basic map VC code has shown us a lot of quirks that we are ironing out. The result of all this is that when we release v3 with maps and devtools, it will be fairly polished system fully capable of doing something that was actually quite difficult to do in V2, despite the flexibility it had over V1, which was .. make an RPG. While simultaneously maintaining V2's ability to effectively make non-RPG tile based games.
Here's a little screenshot of the current build of maped3:
clicky
You'll notice in this screenshot that we're looking at the obstruction view, and that its different than the previous verges. The entity system that we settled on uses pixel-accurate obstructions, but still tile-based obstructions. So, you have obstruction tiles in addition to your graphic tiles. The obstruction tiles are embedded at the end of the tileset, and the basic obstruction types shown in the screenshot are all automatically included in any tileset. However, you can make any bitmap of any shape, the obstructions are pixel accurate. Additionally, when you have diagonals, your character smoothly slides along them... eg, if you press RIGHT into a 45-degree angle, the engine will move you up/right. This is all functional right now. A key feature that grue wanted, indeed, insisted on, annoying me muchly, is that your entity/CHRs can have 'hotspots' of any size, you are not limited to 16x16 obstruction cores (but the tile size is still 16x16 no matter what). You move on a pixel by pixel basis rather than a tile by tile basis, as well.
Edit: I wanted to add that, if you slap two diagonal lines 2 tiles apart, you can easily achieve the 'FF6 stair effect', where just pressing left or right, or up or down, will force you to move along the diagonal, once youre in the 'tunnel'. The diagonals and pixel movement, as well as full support for party following that v2 never really had, all give the controls a much nicer feel.
As for the release schedule- what is currently released I would call an alpha. I've decided we will also release what I would call a beta, which will consist of the fully functional map/entity system and the dev tools (at this time, it'll probably consist of the command-line CHRMAK, maped3, and the packfile editor), and fully or partially complete version of Sully 1.5 (depending. Whenever we're ready to make a release). That will NOT be the official release, but should allow people to begin making actual games. At that point, we'll fix any bugs that are reported from the beta, and we will work on things like the full documentation, a nice little 'dev tools' installer, help files for maped, etc. But there will be a beta release between now and then (which we weren't previously sure of, but
damn, I have a whole new respect for how much work creating Sully was in the first place now ^_^)
So thats where things are, hopefully you'll see more soon!
