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Last weekend I hit Barcamp NYC, and gave a quick demo of the engine, and the Designer. Was meaning to attend both days, but ended up only doing a little bit of Saturday morning - a shame because I usually get a kick out of just going to random presentations. So if you're here because of that presentation... welcome!

On the code side - fixing up crash reports, and doing a bunch of stuff to iron out the code generation process. When I'm done it'll be vastly less irritating to setup engine customizations - the designer will copy the entire source code for the engine into a seperate project, and it'll then reference that project, instead of just copying the DLL and referencing that. Should make it much easier to modify engine code, as well as step through it!

Also fixing a couple of behind the scenes things - pushing an update that adds, say, a new template, is a bit more complicated than I'd like it to be, and while I remember the process right now, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I forget some critical step and send out some sour update that breaks everyone. So, simplifying all that stuff - doesn't translate into anything that you guys can see, though.

And... iOS building! Getting closer!

So, Ludum Dare is in its home stretch... I kinda bowed myself out of the actual compo this morning as I realized my priority was to get a sample game complete for my engine, not necessarily to finish in 48 hours. This morning it came down to "doing things in the fastest possible way" vs "doing things in a way that people can learn from later," and I decided I wanted to go slow and be illustrative. So, I'm going to miss the deadline, but I'll end up with something ultimately more valuable. Fun times though, and I'm very excited to see what games come out!

This makes 2 complete samples almost done. The other sample is breakout, which is in the final stages of documentation now... might be tonight if I'm feeling more like writing instead of coding. Watch for them both to appear here real soon.

On the new features front - just finished work on a whopper. You're now able to "cast" a game object ID directly to a specific game object, and then call public methods on that game object. Say you have a game object named foo, and a method in there called DoSomething(). Assuming m_fooID is a valid ID of a "foo" game object, you can now do: S.foo(m_fooID).DoSomething(). This is way more intuitive, faster, and easier than making a custom event that only foo responds to (though custom events are still very useful in some cases).

Also - player profiles are getting "methodized." Player profiles have until now been just variables, but LD48 really brought out the need to have methods on there as well. For example - say your player profile has variables holding the max HP, max MP, current experience, and experience level. When a character "levels up," you want to increase HP max and MP max, increment experience level, and set current experience back to 0. All easy stuff, but right now there's no good "home" for this code. Soon though, you will be able to make, say, a LevelUp() method of the player profile, and call it via S.LocalPlayer.LevelUp().

To accommodate this, I'm planning on changing the "Vars" tab in the project properties - going to move the global variables to their own tab, move variables of the player profile will go off to the list window, and make it so in the tab you'll be able to create methods. It'll look a lot like editing a script module. Player profiles won't have states but they will have the ability to respond to a few events (Created, ShuttingDown seem like obvious wants).