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.
I’ve fixed everything I’ve come across, and I think I’ve got all of them now, but I can’t be 100% sure until I’ve finished all the event editors. What I do know is that I’ve run some very large and complex scripts from big projects through the whole process, and tweaked things to the point that they all produce valid code now. The script engine isn’t quite ready for this release, but it should be in the next one.
So here’s what *is* in this release:
- A ton of tweaks and fixes to the script system.
- Several performance improvements, especially at startup. A large project with lots of tilesets used to take several seconds to load. That’s been dramatically reduced now, as has the time it takes to open a map with lots of scripts on it.
- The sound system has been replaced by a new one based on Disharmony, a fan-made replacement for RPG Maker’s sound system. I’ve worked with the author to add in support for tracked music, and I’m planning on adding some script commands in the future to allow game makers to access Disharmony’s extended features directly. (Right now Disharmony has ways to use some special audio effects, but since it’s not built into RPG Maker, it has to use weird hacks and workarounds to get at them.)
- Editors have been added for several new script commands, including the teleport group.
- A bug introduced in the last version that keeps you from being able to place a hero on the map in Run mode has been fixed.
That’s all for now. Hopefully the next update will be out quicker than the last one. I’ve just gotta get a couple details worked out in the script compiler and then it should be ready, and I can start incorporating the script engine code from my early POC into TURBU, and it’ll start feeling like a real game engine.