Hello! Just to let you know about the state of the project, yes it is being continued and in fact, most of the planned features has been finished, making it close to a completion and may have been ready for beta testing. We will now call Pre-Release as Beta now.
I also has an upcoming levels this year that I have not released yet, with also some improvements to the older levels as well. You will see the release and improvements after the release of FortRise v5.0 since the levels are now depends on this version.
Here’s the features and changes that I’ve made before writing this blog:
As I’ve told you in the previous blog where I will implement the Runtime Atlas Packer, well, the atlas structure has also been changed to work with the Runtime Atlas.
The new layout will work like this: Instead of having an atlas.png file and atlas.xml , you instead use the folder
that match these names like atlas , menuAtlas , bgAtlas , and bossAtlas . These names are the only valid option you can
use since this is how TowerFall’s Atlas originally works anyway.
Here’s how the file structure would look like:
12345678 Content
L Atlas
L atlas
L enemies
L slime.png
menuAtlas
L variants
L noDodgeCooldown.png
You will then use the following property to retrieve the texture:
This is also useful for using it with GameData as you cannot simply load your own Atlas with it, so we just take the vanilla atlas instead.
This is an optional feature, so if you are tired of moving into this new structure just yet, or cannot simply do that because of how old the mod is, you can simply not do this at all and just use Atlas, it is up to you.
On top of this changes, the texture replacement has also changed as well, but this time, is it not optional as the previous one is proving to be fragile and hard to work with. But the changes here is massively improved anyway, and you might dislike how it is implemented, but what can we do anyway?
To implement texture replacement, you first map the texture path of the texture you want to replace from a vanilla texture, example:
enemies/slime/slime , but this does not actually works as the default behavior of the Atlas Structure is to put a mod prefix at the start
of the path. To combat this, you encapsulate the path with the parenthesis like so: (enemies/slime/slime) and this should not include
a prefix.
Also, the tagging has been changed too, to work with this, you need to create a file that match similarly to the texture you want to tag with
a .tag extension, example: (enemies/slime/slime).tag , inside of that file, this is where you put the tag like this:
12 level=ExampleLevelNameHere
theme=ThemeHere
And that is pretty much it, we need your feedback around this changes so we can try and improve this a little bit more!
With these features, comes with a new great tool, hot reloading! Texture hot reloading allows the game to reload the texture upon changes to the file. This new structure allows the hot reloading to work properly and this is great for archer and texture pack creators.
The amount of time that the mod will need to be relinked has been sped up, so the load times would not be that slower anymore.
I also did a sidequest to rewrite the quest’s wave system. This now allows us to spawn events to the quest levels and programatically implement one. This includes such as summoning Miasma Walls to the level, Lavas, etc.. I will use this feature as well to my upcoming levels to see how this works out.
The way how it works is that we have a new element to the quest data called <event> , this takes a child of string, and an attributes
defined by the mod developer. You put this <event> inside of a <wave> element where the group is also located as well.
The event should automatically disappear after a wave is finished, but level creators also has an ability to make
the event disappear early by using <event_disappear> which just takes a child of string.
This also works on Gauntlet, but the event would not disappear automatically, so the <event_disappear> would come in handy.
This is all the changes I have made so far, and the fact that there’s also some lingering plans as well, I may able to do them
as well. I would love to create a new GUI installer, so that might be the next one I will do. And some #mod-suggestion
on the TowerFall Discord Server that could be in the mod loader as well.
School is starting tomorrow, and the time and my sanity would going to be my enemy when developing this mod loader. If you would love to
support this project. You may contribute via Github on the FortRise Repository. The current branch
on-going is the fortfs branch. I will also create a guide to how to contribute this project pretty soon after my school is done tomorrow.
Alternatively, you may also support me through donation by buying me a Ko-Fi. A small amount of money would be greatly appreciated!
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