I’ve been spending some serious time on the next release of PyWright, and been having a blast. It kind of started when Ptapcc from court-records.net started asking me if PyWright could handle certain features he was interested in. When looking closely at what he wanted, most of the things were either doable right now, or would be doable with just a few modifications to the PyWright core.

One of the features had to do with zooming, which had already been implemented but not hooked up to wrightscript; and the other had to do with being able to do collision detection with wrightscript alone.

Now I am not trying to compete with pwlib, I don’t intend to fully replicate the edgeworth walkabout code. But I was interested in whether implementing that was possible without too many changes to the engine.

After implementing a few things, each change led to another, and beta 10.95 is turning out to be one of the biggest updates PyWright has ever had. Most of the updates are small, but quite a few of them are meaningful enough to really have an effect. Being able to add graphics to buttons, rock-solid saving capabilities, and more control over where code jumps (label none is being deprecated) can make workarounds the exception rather than the norm.

It’s such a big set of fixes in fact, that I am starting to think that the “beta 10.95″ moniker isn’t really fitting. PyWright for the most part has been pretty stable. Each release brings issues along with it that can break games, but the amount of changes needed to update games to be compatible has been low. I would have liked to break old games less than I have, but it was beta right? Well now it’s not. I’m not going to hide behind the beta name any longer. The internet has enough betas on it’s hand.

Henceforth, the next version of PyWright is going to be named version 0.95, and it is the series of releases that will eventually (and soon) be 1.0. I will still keep tweaking things as I always do, I’m sure 0.95 will break something, but I am aiming for more stability from this series. Changing the name is part of that. 0.95 will be out this February for sure. It will require new binaries for those of you using the binary releases.

Currently I am methodically testing the save feature in every possible situation I can come up with to ensure that it is crash-free.

Oh, and the mythical beta 11? Besides being somewhat on hold, it’s new name is going to be version 2.0.

After much neglect, I am going back to work on the next version of PyWright beta 10. I’ve already done a few things, but I want to make it a very polished release. I will need your help to uncover those pesky bugs that have been hiding for some time. PyWright isn’t perfect, and likely never will be, at least until beta 11 fixes everything. But that keeps slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future; so it is time for beta 10 to get another kick in the pants and strut its stuff!

Discussion here:
Forum to discuss current bugs

Yes, AAO and documentation are still on the table, and in a big way. Another chapter is almost finished, and aao is in final testing.

November has come and gone, and been a very full month for me, leaving precious little room to even think about PyWright. Here is the plan for the rest of the year.

Documentation – Within the next week the rest of the documentation pages will be up. I’ll say, by next tuesday. These documentation pages are taken from the doc.txt that ships with the engine, but embelished and rewritten to be less confusing. There will most likely still be areas that need cleaning up, but something will be there so it’s not a pointless section to visit anymore. A tutorial is still in progress.

AAO Converter – Maybe this will be a christmas present Honestly it’s almost read, I just need some time for a final push to polish it up.

Beta 10 series – There may or may not be another release this month. I am trying to get sound working on the mac version, if a solution to that is found there will be another release. Other than that it depends on if there are any reasonable feature requests and/or bug reports in the near future. The engine seems pretty stable to me for now. There are things I want to add, that could make it before beta 11, but that list is getting shorter and shorter.

It’s not long before I’ll need to really push for Beta 11, but my goal of finishing it before the end of the year is not looking likely. On the other hand, I am still constantly refining it, so when it is ready it will be seriously good stuff. I have decided though to focus on helping users with beta 10 issues for now; through docs, tutorials, bugs, and just general help. Please ask if you need anything!