whatsnew.txt for callipygous release candidate

WHAT IS NEW?

March ?? 2016 [Callipygous]

  * New Features
    * Ported to Android phones and tablets, as well as specific support
      for the OUYA, Gamestick and FireTV Android-based consoles!
      New "Platform-specific options" menu in General Game Data.
      See http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Making_Android_games
      for information about how to port your game. You can't yet use
      the Distribute Game menu for Android. [James, Ralph]
    * While placing doors in the map editor you can now specify door
      number, and jump to existing door locations [Ralph]
    * When buying equipment in a shop, show stat bonuses [James]
    * When hiring heroes in a shop, show hero portraits [James]
    * Split "Change Box Styles", "Change User-Interface Colors" into
      two separate menus [James]
    * Split "General Preference Bitsets" and "Backwards-compatibility
      Bitsets" into two menus [Ralph]
    * Clean up orphaned temporary folders when you exit game [James]
    * Games can now optionally increase (or decrease) the number of
      save/load slots that are available. [James]
    * In the font editor you can set roughly which characters are
      icons. If you use a font with the extra Latin-1 characters
      (eg. with accents), then those letters will now show correctly in
      the .txt file when exporting textboxes.  And characters which are
      icons won't be exported as garbage in .hsi files. [Ralph]
    * Attack chains conditions can now be based on the stats of the
      targets [James]
    * Attack bitset "Never trigger elemental counterattack" [James]
    * The map editor's Clone tool now has separate 'merge' and 'replace'
      modes (Ctrl+M to toggle) [Ralph]
    * When adding a new map layer you may copy an existing one [Ralph]
    * When importing an 8-bit backdrop or tileset (eg. exported from
      another game) color 0 (transparency) is preserved; when importing
      a 24/32-bit one you now have the option to pick the background
      color [Ralph]
    * Ability to specify the positions of the frames in the source
      spritesheet when importing with the sprite editor in full-set
      mode (regular offsets between frames only) [Ralph]
    * Additional master palettes in import/ [Soda_piggy, Dragontao]
    * Added Saved Game Settings menu, with new options to enable saving
      and restoring of:
      * the spritelayer slice (default parent for new slices). Slice
        handles to these slices remain valid after loading.
      * strings (including display settings)
      [Ralph]
    * Most 32 bit BMPs should be importable now [Ralph]
    * Attack damage bitset "Healing poison causes regen, and reverse";
      useful when attacker or target absorbs damage [Ralph]
    * Enemies can now be placed anywhere onscreen in formations [Ralph]
    * Added F7 debug key to kill all targettable enemies. Also, the tag
      debugger is available in-battle with F4; instant-run moved to
      Ctrl+F4. [Ralph, James]
    * Added Shift+Tab debug key to speed up the game while held down
      (an alternative to Ctrl+Plus/Minus debug keys) [Ralph]
    * New formation options: Victory tag to set a tag according to
      whether the battle was won, and an option to prevent game over
      on death. [MirceaKitsune, Ralph]
    * The textbox editor now wraps text as you type [Ralph]
    * Automatically keep a few backup copies of any rpg file you edit
      This is no substitute for manual backups! Do not forget to
      back up your own work! [James]
    * Menu for basic importing and exporting of tilemap data from/to
      .tilemap and .bmp files (the .bmps are minimaps). [Ralph]
      To export images of maps, use RMSephy's tool instead:
      https://github.com/Spencer-Zhang/ohr-cartographer
    * Option to adjust the framerate. This isn't really a finished
      feature, as increasing the framerate leads to crazy walking
      animations.  You probably shouldn't change the framerate in an
      existing game, as it will break all your wait() lengths and hero,
      npc, camera, etc. movement speeds. [Ralph]
    * Global sound effect options for steal attack success, failure,
      and no item to steal. [Ralph]
    * Added Regen icon to Battle System Options. [Ralph]
    * Hero positions in battle can be customized. [James]
    * Starting hero ID can be customized, and you can also set a
      'starting' textbox to display on a new game. [Ralph]
    * Added "Old attack positioning at bottom-left of target" back-
      compat bitset, which if you turn off places attack sprites at
      the center of the target instead. [Ralph]
    * You can now run multiple copies of Custom at once (but can't
      open the same .rpg more than once). [Ralph]
    * You can now use the mouse to select or highlight slices in the
      slice editor, press F5 to edit the hidden root slice, F6 to shift
      around the view, and V to toggle slice visibility. [Ralph]
    * New .rpg files start with a few template walkabout sets, donated
      by FnrrfYgmSchnish
    * Added options to set how large the game's window should be by
      default (by changing the scaling factor). The default size will
      for most people be larger than the old 2x default. [Ralph]
    * The Distribute Game options will make use of Mac or Windows icons
      if it finds the icon files next to your .rpg file. See
      http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Icons for detaits [James]

  * Changes
    * Hidden menu items no longer affect the width of a menu [Ralph]
    * A new Debug/Release mode setting replaces the old script
      errorlevel. All existing games default to Release mode. Release
      mode hides almost all script errors and warnings; Debug mode
      should be used for testing but not for release. [James]

  * Bugfixes
    * Fixed a few cosmetic bugs in the equip menu including possibly
      wrong resultant stat value being shown [Ralph]
    * Hero stats menu would freeze if Maximum Level was zero [Ralph]
    * You can now change the music with a script immediately after a
      map change without the ambient music playing for a moment [Ralph]
    * Bug 857: Focus camera cannot focus on spots close to map edge
      [James]
    * Fix heroes getting stuck in active-time battle mode if they are
      in the middle of targetting an attack and get hit with a stun
      or mute attack. [James]
    * "showtextbox happens immediately" backcompat bitset (on for new
      games) helps to prevent bugs due to showing two boxes at once;
      "show textbox" now affects "current textbox" immediately [Ralph]
    * HSpeak accepts files with Mac line-endings again [Ralph]
    * Fix attacks that use the attacker's max stats as the base attack
      stat [James]
    * Fix vehicles that are configured to disable random battles [James]
    * Bug 997: Crash/freeze when fullscreening in Mac OS 10.7 and later
    * Bug 777: 'Load' menu called from a customisable menu showed a
      'New Game' button which did nothing [Ralph]
    * Disabling palette colours for backdrop/tileset import didn't work
      for 8-bit BMPs. (Also added mouse support.) [Ralph]
    * Bug 1004: Copying a shop didn't copy all the shop items [Ralph]
    * Hero attack animations didn't occur if they were weak [Ralph]
    * Bug 1005: "hero is walking" didn't work for heroes other than
      leader when the caterpillar party was enabled [Ralph]
    * Bug 763: NPCs and heros flickered when you walked over the edge
      of a wrapping map [Ralph]
    * Multi-hit attacks no longer causing dying enemies to dissolve/
      fade multiple times, and additional hits are cancelled once all
      targets have died [Ralph]
    * On-keypress scripts are now always triggered when mouse buttons,
      or keys other than move, use and cancel, are held down [Ralph]
    * Fix general map data corruption that occured when loading certain
      very old games released before July 8 1999 [James]
    * Fix a few problems when installed in a read-only location [Ralph]
    * Bug 2013: Pre-Beelzebufo games expected backdrops to appear
      above the sprite layer [Ralph]

  * New Plotscripting Stuff
    * "Menu action plotscript" special script trigger to run a script
      instead of opening the main menu [Lakan Inocencio]
    * subscripts: scripts embeddable inside other scripts, with access
      to their local variables [Ralph]
    * "read item description" counterpart to existing "read item name"
      [James]
    * "get sprite default pal" [James]
    * "NPC is disabled" for detecting when an NPC reference is disabled
      by tags or by one-time-use [James]
    * "string sprintf" for easier piecing together of strings [Ralph]
    * "script error", "get calling script id", "get script name",
      "dump slice tree" [Ralph]
    * Make $id="foo" return id so that you can write showstring($1="foo")
    * Press F5 in Custom's main menu or Script Management menu to
      reimport the last imported scripts. And while testing a game
      you can now set the scripts to be reloaded automatically (from the
      F5 in-game debug menu) [Ralph]
    * "camera follows slice" [Ralph]
    * "get/set/reset hero picture/palette" family of commands can now
      also manipulate hero portrait pictures [James]
    * "get level mp" now takes an additional argument, "current stat"
      or "maximum stat" [Ralph]
    * plotscr.hsd, scancodes.hsi and your game's .hsi file are now all
      included automatically, so there's no need to put those "include"
      lines at the top of your scripts file [Ralph]
    * "get/set active battle pause on all menus" [James]
    * "dissolve sprite", "cancel dissolve", "sprite is dissolving",
      "wait for dissolve" [James]
    * "running on desktop", "running on mobile", "running on console",
      "running on windows", "running on mac", "running on linux"
    * "show virtual gamepad", "hide virtual gamepad",
      "auto virtual gamepad" [James]
    * "get horiz align", "get vert align", "get horiz anchor",
      "get vert anchor" [James]
    * "create select" "slice is select" "set slice select index"
      "get slice select index" "slice child index" [James]
    * "create scroll" "slice is scroll" "set scroll bar style"
      "get scroll bar style" "set scroll check depth"
      "get scroll check depth" "scroll to child" [James]
    * "create panel", "slice is panel", "get panel is vertical",
      "set panel is vertical", "get panel primary index",
      "set panel primary index", "get panel percent as int",
      "set panel percent", "get panel pixels", "set panel pixels",
      "get panel padding", "set panel padding" [James]
    * "next npc reference" [Ralph]
    * "input string with virtual keyboard",
      "input string with mouse keyboard" [James]
    * "unhide mouse cursor", "hide mouse cursor" [James]
    * "pixel focus camera" [James]
    * Added 'visible only' argument to "slice at pixel" and
      "find colliding slice" [Ralph]
    * "send email" (Android only) [Ralph]

  * Performance Fixes
    * Fixed delay when opening a menu that happened when a large number
      of menus were defined [Ralph]
    * HSpeak was extremely slow (potentially hours) at reading files
      with DOS/Windows line-endings on Linux/Mac [Ralph]
    * The script interpreter was running tight loops much (eg 2x) slower
      than it used to before Beelzebufo [Ralph]
    * Creating or reparenting thousands of slices was slow [Ralph]

  * Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
    * Experimental support for ARM and other non-x86 devices, such as
      the Raspberry Pi, and for native 64-bit builds. All thanks to the
      FreeBASIC developers! [Ralph]