The last official release (the Alpha) was more then two years ago (February 2011). Today we want to finally release a new version that we declare as stable: v0.1 (codename “EV0001”)
This release is dedicated to our IRC bot named “EV0001”, thanks for serving us with log files and pizza in the last years.
Together with the new release of the Player we also release a new website. (this blog will serve as the news section of the site, so nothing new here)
Noticeable changes in 0.1:
- An embedded font (called Shinonome) that looks like MS Gothic. No external font file needed anymore!
- Improved event interpreter, many games that were broken before are more playable now (e.g. going to bed and entering the dream in Yume Nikki works now)
- Rendering issues with some BMP and PNG files were fixed.
- Screenshot function (press F10)
- New Name Input dialog with better layout and support for Japanese characters
- Huge improvements in the internal memory management of the Player, crashes because of deletion of still referenced game objects shouldn’t happen anymore.
- Multi-language RTP support. Play Japanese games that use files from the RTP with the English RTP (and vice-versa). The Player handles all the magic in the background for you.
- For developers: The graphic backends SDL and SoftBitmap were removed, Pixman is now the one and only (Audio and Input are still handled by SDL)
You can download the Player in the download section of our new website. For 0.1 we only provide binaries for the common systems Windows, Linux and MacOS X. We don’t have enough developers to maintain lots of ports and they were slowing down our development process. But don’t worry, our Player is still perfectly portable to other systems. Ports for other systems will be readded in our ongoing development process. At the moment improving the compatibility and the user experience of the Player is our highest priority.
The next release (v0.2, codename “Alex”) will probably be released this year and on our roadmap is the long awaited battle system and and a better save system and of course improvements in the user experience. And we plan to make new stable releases more often so that you don’t have to wait two years again :).
At last we recommend that you check out our new user section in the wiki containing many useful information about features of the Player!