TURBU

If you tried to import a project on version 0.9.3, you may have noticed that the right edge of a lot of the tile palette came out blank.  Turns out this was a bug in SDL.  (A couple months ago someone checked in a fix for one bug, but it ended up breaking something else.)  I’ve patched the code and updated the 0.9.3 installer.

This error shouldn’t affect anything in TURBU other than project imports, so if you already have 0.9.3 and you’re not importing any projects, you probably don’t need to re-download and reinstall it.

As usual, I come out with a new release, and get a bunch of bug reports right away.  So I’ve been working on fixing them for the last couple weeks, and now I’ve got version 0.9.3 ready on the Downloads page. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that took longer than I thought it would.  (Story of my life!)  And unfortunately, I was wrong about the last release when I said that re-importing of existing projects shouldn’t have to happen any more.  As I’ve been working on getting scripting support set up, I found several cases where the importer was getting things wrong in the event code, sometimes corrupting them badly enough that data was lost and could not be recovered simply by looking at the output.

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I’ve been really busy the last couple months, between work, a programming conference, and personal stuff, but I’ve found some time to work on TURBU, particularly the script code.

I’ve been torture-testing the script compiler by generating very large scripts from projects that use a lot of scripting and seeing how it handles them.  It’s not ready to see daylight just yet, but the scripting system will definitely be in the next update.  For now, though, there will be a few more event editors, some bugfixes, and an all new music/sound system.

The current system is based on SDL_Mixer, and it has a lot of problems because of limitations in the way SDL_Mixer is designed.  I can’t talk about the new one quite yet, because it’s based on someone else’s code that isn’t quite ready for release, but it will be able to do everything RPG Maker’s audio player can do, plus a few new features.  The problems that the current version is having with MIDIs and MP3s will be gone, and there will be proper support for Tempo and Balance changes for all audio formats.

As soon as the new player code is ready, I’ll get the next release set up.  And I’m expecting that later this week…

I’ve been doing a bit of work with the Move command lately.  One of the challenges of building a real script engine into a system that’s supposed to behave like RPG Maker is finding a way to translate all the event commands into scripts.  Most of them are easy, but some are kind of challenging, like the Move command.  It represents each move operation as a number, unless it’s one of the commands that takes parameters, like “Play Sound” or “Switch On”, in which case things get more complicated.  But one of my goals for the script system is to make each command something that can be written and understood in a normal script.  You can’t do that with a string of numbers.

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I’d just barely released 0.9.0 when DJC from the Everlong project sent me a handful of bug reports about various things with music playing and script editing being broken.  The script stuff was fairly straightforward, but the music wasn’t.  The problems were showing up on his end, but not on mine.  But after a few days of coordinating back and forth and debugging with him, I found the problems with the music playing code and managed to fix most of them.

There’s one problem.  MP3s won’t play right.  There are some pretty serious compatibility problems with the MP3 library I’m using, problems I can’t fix.  I’ve reported the issues to the maintainer and he said he’ll look at them pretty soon, but until they get fixed, I’ve disabled MP3 support in TURBU to prevent crashes and memory corruption errors.  Hopefully I’ll be able to re-enable it soon.  But the other music types are all working fine, so go ahead and grab the installer from the Downloads page.

The past few weeks have been one demonstration of Hofstadter’s Law after another for me.  I figured that putting the finishing touches on the project conversion code would go quickly, and then more and more new details to take care of kept popping up.  If I was going to claim that the project converter would never have to be run again, I had to make sure that it would catch everything, and that’s harder than it sounds.  But I finally got everything finished up and tested, and I’ve added the new build to the Downloads page.

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OK, gotta apologize here. I thought I could have all the necessary work for the database update done this week.  But it turns out making sure that you’ll never need to run the importer again requires a lot of attention to details, and I’ve been chasing them down all week, and now it’s past my bedtime on the last night of the week and tit’s not quite finished yet.  But all the major stuff is done now.  I should have the update ready by Monday evening.

I took a few months off from working on TURBU directly in order to build some stuff that will greatly improve the scripting system, once I get it implemented. But now I’m back on track and I’ve uploaded a new release. It implements several new editors, fixes a few bugs, and makes projects load a little bit faster by moving some of the work into the background.

This means that you don’t have to sit and stare at a non-responsive user interface and wait for the entire project database to load into memory when you hit F8 or go to edit a map object; the editor will automatically take care of that in the background when you first open the project. Unfortunately, until the background loading is complete, you won’t be able to use the database or map object editors, but this will get you up and running faster overall, and it adds a progress bar at the bottom of the editor so you can see how far along it is.

I’ve made some changes to the import code and to the database, so previously imported projects are no longer valid and will need to be re-imported, but you probably expected that anyway by now, right?

Changes since 0.8.7:

• Moved project database loading to an automatic background task
• Fixed an import error when converting an event script containing a Full Heal command
• Added support for global event scripts in the database editor
• Added support for adding new lines to an event script
• Changed the project importer so that a successful import will automatically load the imported project into the editor
• Fixed script generation errors for integer variables, and for the Teleport, Change Experience, and Keyboard Input commands
• Fixed a bug on the Switch editor where sometimes all radio buttons could be deselected
• Added editor support for several new script commands
• Fixed a script conversion bug where the contents of the ELSE clause on conditional statements got put outside the ELSE clause (on the level above it) instead of inside
• Fixed a couple graphical problems related to resizing

More to come soon!