Hello! It’s been a while.
While there hasn’t been a blog post in a while, that doesn’t mean we’ve just been dormant! A lot of work in areas outlined in the last post has happened, and we’re just not at the next big milestone yet. I figured I’d provide an update anyway to showcase some of the stuff that’s happened in more detail.
The largest bulk of progress that happened was in areas outlined in the last post – going through every element we added and making sure it works well and doesn’t suddenly break when someone tries to use it in unconventional ways. Not much more to describe about it, so I’ll shut my mouth now and let the gifs speak for themselves. These are only a couple of the ways in which new elements can be used in Beta 4:
Some NPCs expose a couple of configurations about them to the editor, letting you change their settings per-instance. An example is the fire snake shown above, which can have its length adjusted. Other examples are the SMW minigame cloud which lets you configure how many coins it throws, and the SMW Bowser statue which has a configurable volley of fireballs. The latter is included in another gif below. These settings will only be available in .lvlx level files, which will be the standard starting with Beta 4. Don’t worry, all .lvl files will still be perfectly functional.
Very common checks we are doing are against the reserve item box, generators, held and thrown state, as well as interactions of NPCs with other NPCs and blocks. The goal is to make all of them possible for all NPCs included. I hope you will check them all out and find cool things you can do with them!
We’re also beefing up some older elements. The new blocks of Beta 3 didn’t always support contained NPCs, for example. There was some room for improvement which we’ve now used. That isn’t to say the old elements were weak. See it more as a Power-Up for Beta 3 elements.
The above gif is from my own testing and tweaking of these elements. The others are compilation of some of these results.
(debugging of Stretches)
The goal is that people don’t have to worry about any crashes when using SMBX in creative ways, and I hope you understand the long development time that comes as a result of this.
That’s all for today. See you next time!
~Enjl