TURBU

I’ve got the basics of event movement working, but getting the hero to move smoothly requires me to redo the keyboard input code.  That, plus finals at school, means it’ll take a few more days before the next update.  Expect something by Saturday at the very latest, though.

All music, sound and image formats supported by RPG Maker 2000 are in place, as are 70 of the 90 script commands.  The map engine itself is about 80% finished.  Next week’s project will be worth about another 10%:  Event movement.  Making all events move and react properly, from their definitions as well as from scripts, is a pretty huge task, which I can only hope I’ll be able to get done in one week!

Event movement is the last major hurdle remaining in the event commands.  Most of the rest of them are “fluff” commands that can be set up very easily, and also most of them relate to major sections of the program that haven’t been implemented yet, like the battle system, the save system or multiple maps.  So after event movement is done, I’ll switch gears and set up multiple map support.  Just another few weeks, and the TURBU engine  will be able to play games from start to finish, not counting battles.  (Those will probably be next.)

I’ve thrown all sorts of things into this update, and it’s almost ready. I was hoping to have it tonight, but debugging the timing on image movement took a long time.

Expect to see:

1. Create, move, and erase image commands fully implemented.
2. The BGM-related event commands implemented. (Although SDL_Mixer still doesn’t like MIDIs all that much…)
3. The Wait event command.
4. Parallel and auto-start events working.
5. A real title at the top of the Map Viewer screen.

This is going to be an exciting update. With parallel events, delays, and image management, a lot of the most popular event commands will now be working. This is finally starting to feel like a real RPG engine!

There was a bug in the Map Viewer’s music handler that made MIDI music only come out the left speaker.  Unfortunately, the trouble was in the SDL library, not my own code.  Well, I just got an updated version of SDL, and that’s been fixed.  Background music will play right now.  But there still seems to be a problem with switching between one MIDI and another.  I’ll report that to the SDL developers’ list and see what happens.

Coding the event system has taken several months of hard work. I’m almost done with the second page, as RPG Maker categorizes them. There are still 11 second-page commands to go, though, and they’ll be hard work. But after that comes the third page, which is mostly fluff, from a programmer’s perspective. I should be able to finish the third page in much less time than the first or second pages took. Then I just have to put the finishing touches on the event system and move on to implementing multiple maps.