In the past month I was exploring mostly the graphics features of the system, designing engines, game ideas, and by this certain things occurred to me, which direction is getting realized with the current updates.
- First the most important is that not only games, tools also could suffer from bit-rot, and may be desirable to be built on RRPGE (and not with some host-specific messing, especially if that messing would require reproducing features of RRPGE). So to get these possible, the system undergone changes to become more computer-like than console.
- Currently the changes covered parts which were not implemented yet anyway (the input and the file system interface). These were the major problems, but meanwhile smaller things (like supporting changes between 4 bit and 8 bit modes) also occurred on my TODO list. Next updates will cover these alongside fixing up the current prototype emulator.
- The audio system will encounter some changes: the Mixer will stay as-is, but an interface providing more freedom will be realized (the hows are already settled, implementing this into the specification and the emulator needs work), which will also narrow the host interface slightly (which is good). The changes will give more freedom to designing timing sensitive graphics engines.
- I am also thinking about giving the system a console or logging support. Maybe I will rather discard this at the end as non-critical.
The RRPGE License also undergone some changes. These are rather only clarifications, to give a more definitive meaning to certain cases (primarily about Creative Commons licenses), but as an other goal I also restricted the rights gained with the RRPGE Developer Agreement. It is just not right to let that offer a huge gaping hole in the thing, no matter whether the Agreement is under my control or not.
With the changes a larger plan also starts to form: It is a necessity to build an user-friendly maker for the system to make it useful to the general public. This maker will be done within RRPGE. I would attempt to make it in a generic way in that respect that it should support outputting intermediate results (such as sprite sheets, mapping and such) so it stays useful for assembly programming as well. It is also easier and more motivating to work on it this way (that I can also use it in my projects such as Cheetaan Legacy as well).
