Next step is of course the player movement. This means in the next update, you should be able to set the player's starting location and the starting party. In the event later- while you won't be able to make any events yet- it will be possible to place a special event that is the player start marker. Then walking around maps will be possible.

Because it will be possible to make a single event of multiple tiles, you would be able to right click marquee select a whole row and make a special teleport event out of them so you have 1 event to handle the entire pathway's width of teleporting (in case you need to add commands in between teleporting, for example).

Loose pixel movement became a priority a short while back, so both kinds of movement will be written in, basically defining the collision system. A logical interface for making events move around the map will be in place so they can later be used by events.

There we go. This will be the dialog where you assign characters to things, like players. It's a pretty basic part and color selector.



The player editor dialog is kind of.. empty for now. This is only here so you can have a party with names and characters sets. With a party of characters, then you can set the player start position. From a player start position, you're now able to actually walk around maps. Once a character is able to walk around a map, you can have events also walk around the map and be scripted. You see where I'm going with this?

But for now the next release will only have some basic convenience features and this character editor for now.

I've been converting the existing character sprites for RPG Maker 2003 into composite parts. Just a few for testing. "Composite" was a section in the database where you assign the roles for the character sheets you import. You set the type of material there.

You can then add a colormap which applies the color ramps to the character set, and every pure monochrome color (R, G, and B are all equal) gets map to one of 16 selected colors in the map. This method of setting color is the fastest and most accurate where LandTraveller instead used series of functions and only a single color.

The parent body setting then associates parts to a particular body shape. If you use similar body types, you can clear the parent and use none which allows this part to be used by any body type. For the RPG Maker 2003 character sprites, there's just male and female body types.

With this information, the engine can just generate a character on the fly. You can do many things, like allow the player to make their character, make equipped armor and acc. show up on the player, generate many unique NPCs on the fly, etc. There are two slots for optional acc. that show up on top of a composite character.

Of course, sometimes you want a simple single character sheet. The "Full Sprite" type just uses the source sprite as is, which is useful for monsters. Color maps can still be used for full sprites in case you want to palette swap monster sprites.

The system isn't live yet, but I'll have sample characters to show soon.

There will be a lot of the basic features that were missing in the initial release in the next release. I just put the button toolbar there for some shortcuts. There will also be some keyboard shortcuts, the shift click disable auto tiling, the space clickdrag to move view, etc.

I had to implement a different camera model if there was ever going to be perspective video modes in the game. I know people call it Mode 7, but my engine only has two modes so far- mode 0 and mode 1. Perspective mapping is mode 1.