The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

I was able to get the custom dungeon layout I mentioned last month working fairly early in this month. Unfortunately, my hypothesis about the occasional crash being related to rooms on the edge of the map turned out to be incorrect, so I still don't know what's causing it. e.e

Anyway, I switched back to working on Xu's abilities. I had to add to the code a capability for skills to have repeated effects for a single use, because a few of Xu's Song spells work that way. That was a little complicated, but not as bad as I feared it might turn out to be. That aside, it's been mostly animation work. I've gotten through all of Xu's regular skills and the spells for 3/6 of the Songs.

For one of the spells in the third Song, I decided I wanted a fancy startup animation wherein three fireballs whirl in a circle while rising above Xu's head. Of course, circular motions, especially with an added overall movement, are not something the RT2K3 animation editor is designed to do easily. So I whipped up a spreadsheet to calculate the positions the sprites should be in each frame. Of course, placing three sprites in pixel-exact spots, frame by frame, was tedious work.

So I decided to bite the bullet and do something I'd considered before but didn't want to spend the time for: updating the DynDatabaseOverride plugin to be able to import animations data. That way, I could use the numbers from my spreadsheet without having to translate it into the animation by hand. The update took about a week, with probably more than half of that being just updating the documentation and demo project so that other people can make use of it. X) Here are a couple of sample animations I came up with: