TURBU

I’ve been sidetracked by various other concerns lately and gotten way behind on TURBU development, but here’s the update that should have been out about a month ago.  I’ve started working on developing event scripts, and I’ve created editor windows for the first few script commands.  There’s not much yet, but there will be more in the next update.  Hope you like it! (more…)

Yeah, I’m sort of breaking my more-or-less monthly schedule.  I’ve been really busy lately with getting ready for the DelphiLive conference next week.  I’ve got two hour-long sessions to present and it takes a lot of work and concentration to get them ready.  Plus, this next update involves getting all the event-builder dialogs created and working, and that’s really work-intensive.

Since it would take way too long if I waited to update until I had the whole thing finished, I’ll post a progress release once I finish the one I’m currently working on.  That’ll probably be the first week in September, after the conference is over.

A feature as big as making everything animate and move properly is bound to have a few bugs in it.  There were a couple issues where moving map objects could cause a crash.  Those have been fixed, plus a few more minor problems.

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The next update was going to be about scripts, but since so many scripts have to do with the party and other map objects, I decided to make it possible to place a party on the map first, and make the map objects able to move.  I thought this would be ready by last night, but I ran across a difficult glitch in a code library someone else had written, and it took me a while to track down the root of the problem and hack up a fix for it.

Animation was added a few months ago.  There’s a Run and a Pause button on the top of the editor, and Run turns on tile animation but never did much more than that.  Now it does.  Any map objects with movement assigned will walk around now.  Also, if you right-click the map while in Run mode, and it’s on a tile that a character could enter, it will create a party and place it on the map.  It uses the graphic defined for hero #1 for this, so if your project leaves that one blank, like a few do, you won’t see anything.  (That will be addressed in the next release.)

I’ve also added a handful of minor fixes and tightened up the code for drawing water tiles considerably.  If you were having slowdowns on world maps or other areas containing lots of water before, it should be working better now.

One minor issue with this release.  When in Run mode, sometimes the program won’t close. I’m not sure what causes that, and I’m working on tracking it down.  But you can quit just fine if you hit the Pause button first, so it’s not a major problem at the moment.

Thanks to some more bug reports from Everlong’s DJC, I’ve got another bugfix update ready over on the Downloads page.  This fixes several issues with Event Builder, a couple in the Database viewer, and several graphical glitches when drawing water tiles.  Hopefully things are stable for now and no other serious issues will come up.

Yesterday I uploaded the 0.8.0 installer, and I mentioned the Everlong project in my post.  This morning I got an email from the author of Everlong.  He was able to convert his project in the Project Importer, but when he tried to open it he got all sorts of errors.  Oops!

He sent me some very useful information, and I’ve been able to fix a handful of glitches and build a new installer. 0.8.1 is up now.

TURBU version 0.8.0 is out now.  You can find it on the Downloads page.

This update was supposed to be ready last Saturday.  Then I tried to run Everlong through the project importer and discovered a handful of new bugs, one of which took quite a while to track down and fix.  But since the author of Everlong has mentioned several times that he’d like to port his project to TURBU once the editor’s ready, I figure it’s worth taking the time to make sure it will work right.

If you’ve used the project importer before, you’ll probably notice that the map conversion phase goes noticeably slower now.  That’s because it used to only read the map data and disregard all the event scripts, but that’s no longer the case.  Now it will convert the events into the new TURBU Event Builder format, which creates a script tree that you can view in the Map Object Editor box.  You can’t edit scripts yet, but that will be in the next release.

These post tiles are getting a bit predictable lately!  But at least this update took less than a month to get ready.

The new version fixes a few bugs with the way the map objects are drawn, (no more huge, stretched boxes if you’re scrolled somewhere besides the upper-right corner of the map,) and adds some more functionality to the ability to edit map objects.  You can now grab them and move them around, create new ones by double-clicking a blank square, or delete existing ones with the Delete button.  The editor will also recognize arrow keys and the Enter key when editing map objects.  You can also add, delete, copy and paste pages in the map object editor, and edit a page’s sprite.

Now for the fun part.  All the work I’ve put into this engine over the last couple years has been building up to making the whole thing scriptable, and now I have enough in place that I can start working on the scripting system.  I’ll need to work quickly, since in another three months I’m going to this year’s Delphi Live conference to give another presentation on game engine design, and I’ll need to have something worth showing.  So let’s hope I can get a lot done!

Finally, the new update is ready.  It comes with a Run button, which currently doesn’t do anything except turn on animated tiles, and functionality to display the map objects (events) on-screen.  You can edit map objects, to a limited degree at least.  The next update will allow you to create new map objects, move them around, or delete them, which you can’t currently do.

Then I’ll start working on scripting.  It’s taken quite a while to reach this point, but the goal is finally in sight.  Building the scripting system last time took almost a year, but now all the old code is already in place and will mostly still work, so adapting it to the new engine won’t be nearly as time-consuming.

EDIT:

If you downloaded the editor before now, you might not have been able to open it.  The settings for one of the library files apparently got corrupted when I upgraded Visual Studio, and now it wouldn’t run properly on a lot of computers.  I’ve fixed it and updated the installer, and it should work now.

This was supposed to be out last week, but at the last minute I ran into some unexpected trouble with getting the last feature I tried to add to work right.  But it’s up now, and it adds the ability to create new maps, edit map properties, or delete existing maps from the project.  There are also a handful of stability bugfixes and interface tweaks.

This is a pretty major update, from my perspective at least.  I had to modify a lot of things in the code to make Map Properties work, and deletion required a major change to the way I store the map tree in memory.  But it’s working now, so I’m happy.

I also added an error-reporting package.  It can detect if a severe error occurs and prepare an error report file containing technical information about what was going on in the program that will help me fix it more easily.  Hopefully you won’t ever have to see it, but if the error report dialog comes up, please hit “Send Report”, which will attempt to send it automatically over email.  If your computer can’t do that for whatever reason, there’s also an option to save the report to a file.  Either way, please send any reports it comes up with to me so I can fix the bugs more easily.

For the next release, I’m going to work on making the engine actually display characters and events and letting you run the project within the editor.  Most of the code’s already in place from the old Map Viewer, so I’ll just have to adapt it to the new engine.  Hopefully it’ll be ready in a shorter time than this release took!