In the middle of the woods...

Hi everyone,

A lot of time has flown since the last update and here is what has been done since then:

A lot of work has been done to the forest area and related features, and the forest has been enlarged by two new maps, tree variations to make it more colourful, and a new event (Beware of that one!).

New tree variations and new maps.

The map monsters will be also a bit smarter as they will now try to catch your character even out of their wandering area, as long as they can see you.

As for battles, the forest has gained a new shiny battle background thanks to Tamara Ramsay (vectorgurl.com), and a lot of work has been done in improving the battle logic, with the addition of three battle types (wait, semi-active and active ones) making the enemy wait for you to execute actions for your characters... or not. ;)
I also started to work on the very first boss sprite... (Please don't laugh, it's a draft ;]).

Aww, a boss...

More likely now because of this particular monster, I worked on battle character defeats and the battles can now also be lost without forcing you to restart the whole game...

Oops, let's try again...

I also took time to work on updating/upgrading the font used within the whole game to make them a bit more readable, for instance:

New font above, old one below...

 Now as for the invisible coding part, some profiling was done on the code, and I personally made optimizations in the OpenGL draw calls and in the font cache iterations to gain ~20% fps at draw time (according to the two computers I tried so far.)
A warm thanks to 4144 (author of Manaplus) for that.

I would like also to thank Jetrel (Frogatto & friends) for the nice work done on the desert tileset :), Shirish for all the testing and reports, and Nemesis for his willingness in joining the development effort.

Stay tuned! :)