Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Happy New Year to everyone!

Hey!

Just in time to wish you all a Happy New Year to you and your family! :)

While on it, here is a little update, just before 2013 ends. ;)

- Mountain Shrine dungeon in progress!
The Mountain Shrine is now considered made on paper (at least a first suitable version to work on.) and I started to map and script the first rooms. So, we're slowly but surely reaching the end of this first Episode. ;)
I also made and added a first version of the battle background there, prepared the encountered monsters, ...

Time to face the Shrine critters...

- Proper ending credits:
This one was a personal priority for me before the Episode I release, I must say.
I now added support to properly list everyone involved in the project (consciously or not) when you reach the end of the current episode.

- Visuals:
The game's look'n'feel has been improved in several area recently:
- The map stamina bar (telling you how long you can run for) has been redone and IMHO improved. :)
- Bronann standard attacks's visuals have been slightly improved/fixed.
- The boot menu will now hint you about what resolution the game is running.
- Broken/unavailable translations will now be disabled in the corresponding menu, and the game will also tell you what is the currently selected language.

- Support for non 4:3 resolusions
A long-desired feature which is permitting you to now play in 1366x768 for instance (a usual resolution for the current laptops ;])
For now, only a limited set of resolution were statically added, once the migration to SDL 2.x will be complete, I'll add support for the resolutions declared by the system the game is running on.


- i18n / Translations :
Spanish translation support was added thanks to jahalic :)
And Galician and Russian translations were updated/fixed by Gallecio et dimproject respectively.

I also fixed the bug preventing the map titles to properly display when playing in Russian by adding support for custom fonts loading (and reloading) depending on the current language selected.

This also means Asian languages should now be properly supported using specific fonts for them. :)
Any translator tempted?

- Bugfixes / Other small improvements:
There has been the usual set of bugfixes and small improvements during the last month, but more proeminently:

The joysticks D-Pad / Hats handling is now fully working. :)

The scripting API is now handling Images as objects and no more as integer indexes. This permitted me to now handle image script code quite the same way I do for the C++ side, and permits a lot more of flexibility there.

The map mode, menu mode, particle engine, ... have seen simplifications and cleanups.

I also started working toward support for status effects in the map and menu mode. This led to some simplification of the way to display status effects which is now supported in every game mode.
What is left is to add the core logic support to load and properly updates the active effects in the menu and map modes.

Stay tuned and again, a Happy New Year!