Inner Circle Update for April 9 2017! (Patreon)

Hey guys!  

Apologies on being a day late on the update!  I've been working on something I wanted to share with you all and it took a bit longer than anticipated :D.  I'll try to keep the update text brief so you can check it out!  AltairPL also has an update on his engine progress, which as usual you can find below!

Story Presentation

I decided yesterday morning I wanted to do something fun for you guys since I've been locked in my closet poking away at story stuff for so long.  What I've created is a presentation showing off the first (spoiler-free) details of the game's backstory!   Let me know what you think!  

AltairPL's Engine Progress Report

Something had been bothering me since I started working on the new engine, and in the past week I finally learned what it was (and it really wore me out).  No matter what I wanted to tackle after this last monthly progress report, I found myself having to complete something else first.  The first wrench in my gears was that I had to improve file handling to implement support for two things used extensively by RPG maker:

• Having to account for when a requested file is on a path relative to the game exe or inside the RTP folder.
• On top of the path itself, when selecting image/audio file in RPG Maker editor, its name is, in most cases, stored internally without extension, so when a file is needed, this internal name along with internal list of supported extensions, e.g. .png, .jpg for image files, is used to reconstitute file name to use;

The RTP path is stored in the Windows registry, so I had to learn how to retrieve it. This wasn't really hard, but shit has hit the fan when I decided to check what will happen if the RTP path in registry contains non-ASCII characters. If I were to describe all the problems I had with this, this post would be filled with cursing and swearing, so the only thing I'll say is that I freaking hate Microsoft. Anyway, when I finally figured out all related problems, I had to backtrack and adjust my code in few places to make sure that Unicode is used everywhere.

This small victory raised my morale a bit, but not for long, As it turns out, Ruby doesn't play nicely with Windows all the time. Even though Unicode support for Ruby on Windows should be working already in Ruby 1.9, there are still problems with it in Ruby 2.3, which is currently used as a base for the URGE engine.  I had to spend a lot of work and time to make sure that everything is working as intended.

This update of mine is pretty grim already, and even though it was a lot of extra work and planned progress was delayed, it resulted in few things I am happy about, making it a worthwhile detour:

• No matter if it's the game/engine executable itself or any file needed by it, a file path can include Unicode characters, e.g. Polish, Japanese, etc., and it will work no matter what locale/regional settings are used by the operating system.
• File handling was improved and the new engine should be able to handle all file paths produced by the RPG Maker editor. The only thing needed to finish file handling is implementation of encrypted archive support, but for various reasons I'm leaving it for later... much later.