V12 Release and Reflections. (Patreon)

First, I'd like to apologize for not making a post about V12 being out when I should have. Release day was incredibly hectic and I straight up just forgot to post it.

So here it is!

 https://www.rebornevo.com/forum/index.php?/topic/47347-rejuvenation-v12-death-of-one-birth-of-another/ 

Fortunately, this has been an extremely smooth release. There were still a few bugs here and there, from major to minor, but in comparison to v11's release? This went stellar. People seemed to really enjoy the new version as well! That made me pretty happy.

I think one of the most difficult things about this episode was making sure the character switching worked properly, and while it does work pretty well, there are some cracks that need to be filled in. Only problem is that these cracks appear and disappear at random, and it's hard to pinpoint where they'll show up next.

Lemme explain. When a character switches, it goes through a series of commands. They look like this:

The switch "NOTPLAYER" is thrown up so that players can't use Golden Items, as well as check their trainer card because it's never consistent and changing the graphics on the trainer card is a pain. 

The Player Character sprite is changed next. Every character you switch to in this game is loaded on slot 2. This is so we don't have to make a new character slot for every switch imaginable. For this to streamline itself smoothly, we use outfits to change their appearance. (This is why when a character lacks a surf/bike sprite, they turn into another character. They all use the same base!)

Next, we take the player's party and store it into a variable, in this case, variable 543, then we use variable 12 to store the Player's actual name, and subsequently replace it with the character being switched to. Looks convoluted but it's actually pretty simple. 

Except RMXP screws up somewhere and... it's not updating the trainer's party when it should. On rare occasions, the game will take a past party and replace your current one with it. This happened quite a bit in the Dev cycle, but I was able to squash this bug enough to where it becomes a rare phenomenon. Only problem is, fixing this issue is a big pain in the ass now that it's rare and hard to produce. So right now I'm a little annoyed and sort of at a loss. I had ideas for the future that required more character switching like in the pyramid, but I'm not sure this bug is worth it. 

That aside, it was a pretty clean release and I'm proud of what my team and I accomplished!  I'm planning on releasing Patch 1 tomorrow and I'm really hoping that will be enough. We've already started work on v13, but I'm sure those of you who know me aren't surprised about that, haha. 

I still plan on taking it a little bit easy, but I'm eager to get started again. Regular weekly posts are back on track! 

Thank you guys for supporting me! It's been half a year now and I've been in a much more stable place thanks to you guys. I'm not sure I can put it into words how thankful I am, but just know that I am. Very much so.

I hope you all have a wonderful week, and I'll see you guys next Saturday for the first development post of V13. :]