Inner Circle Update for February 8 2017!

Hey everyone!

Gonna jump right into it this week!

V0.06 Map Progress

I really wish I had more pretties to show off this week, but luckily TK has been hard at work figuring out and putting together the render setup for the new environments. It took a full day of testing on his part to figure out the new render setup process, as we are now doing shadows and lighting somewhat differently (even from the recently completed Access Tunnel revamp maps).  I was able to sneak in some time to do a test run for processing the shop area map, and I’m incredibly pleased with the results. It almost looks like we know what we’re doing now!

Story and Design Progress

My main goal for this week was to put together the remaining details for V0.06, with the end objective being a completed design document to use for the remainder of the cycle as I’ve done with the previous two major releases. I’d really been dreading this because the last major revision to the main story was at the beginning of last year, and I’ve compiled a whole crap ton of notes on the subject since then. So many in fact that it quickly became a bigger chore than I envisioned due to them being mixed in with other development notes. So, I took a step back and decided the first thing to do was to get organized. This is what my plan looked like:  

• Merge TO DO Lists
• Clean out / reorganize Documents folder
• Merge story notes / development notes into a single document 
• Filter outdated/overlapping ideas from development notes and organize them into ‘entries’
• Design and implement tagging system to make ‘entries’ searchable via tag
• Create interactive document outline to make entry headings easily searchable
• Using the newly organized story notes, revise and add V0.06 details to main Story Document
• Create Design Document for v0.06
• Use V0.06 Design Document to create team’s master TO DO list for v0.06 
• Create “Essential” TO DO list for V0.06 Inner Circle Release

While I had originally planned to just scour my notes for story content, I ended up merging and refining content from over 80 files down into a tagged and catalogued 22-page document that will be used from here on out to store and organize literally any development related note. This is something I’ve needed for a long time since I often get random ideas and have no way to properly organize them other than to create a separate note file (that I’ll never find again when I need it down the road). The way I’ve done this is I’ve created a tagging system in which I can search entries by general, predefined tags as opposed to content. This means notes and ideas don’t have to be stored in any specific order, and any content that falls into multiple categories can still easily be found since I can just tag it with multiple tags.     

While I’m incredibly pleased with the new system, the downside to all this is that I’m currently only halfway to where I wanted to be this week. I’m currently on the step in my above list about merging story ideas into and revising the main story document, but I’m very hopeful that I’ll have more details for you next week about v0.06 that I wasn’t concrete enough on to disclose previously. Assuming I get that far I’ll potentially even share the full v0.06 design document for those of you that aren’t worried about spoilers :D. 

AltairPL’s Progress

APL has created a list of his accomplishments this past week, so here’s an update from him:

“Lately I've been jumping a lot between various things, and majority of them were more or less minor, so it's hard to list everything. Short list of most important things below.

Related to battle overhaul:

• Fixed crash at Battle Results screen - required adding a lot to new results system, but it will be used for other purposes, so no loss here
• Fixed improper order of action processing, which was causing SP-using actions to fail in certain conditions
• Fixed glitch related to actors' poses... well, it started as a glitch in full concurrency only, but one of the latest changes broke it completely even in no concurrency. Basically the whole pose handling system was rewritten to work in both, and I'm pretty sure it will be also much more versatile and lighter on CPU
• Fixed glitches related to display of actors' and holding enemies' animations and results

Unrelated to battle overhaul:

• Fixed two minor issues at Battle Results screen - pretty old, but it's impossible to trigger them in normal conditions (yet?) so it slipped under our radar
• Fixed glitch related to Neon's High Voltage (and similar skills). Previously, if one of the targets was holding an actor, the action user was changing pose between assist and attack very quickly - now only one pose is being displayed and it's determined based on internal enemy order”

Since APL is definitely ahead of TK and I as far as preparing for V0.06 goes, the past couple of days he’s continued his work on an experiment I mentioned awhile back. The goal of this experiment is to remove as much reliance on RPG Maker as possible, and to replace it with more modern libraries for video, memory management, input and so forth. Obviously this is exactly as complicated as it sounds. That said, we’re both really excited to see how early tests pan out (keep in mind it could flop completely), but assuming they do well this will certainly be a long-term goal and not something to expect any time soon.