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!

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I just uploaded the test game for beta 10.94. It demonstrates most of the new features as best as it can. I’m going to be using this format for future test games. These games serve two purposes – to help me know that the new features work as advertised, and to advertise the features. Previously, the test games have been too technical, and failed in the advertising category. This is not perfect but it’s getting there.

You can download it from the download games section of the pywright engine. It requires maya, godot, and gumshoe, from characters; and pw1 from backgrounds.

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Beta 10.94 release

Beta 10.93 was intended as the last release of Beta 10, I have changed my mind though and decided to have a smoother transition from beta 10 to beta 11. Many many features and a few lingering bugs were reported for beta 10.93, the long period between beta 10.93 and beta 11 would be too long for many of these. Beta 10 is definitely on it’s last legs, but there are still small things that can be done to say goodbye with some fanfare!

Beta 10.94 fixes some elements of the last release that were fundamentally broken, including cross examinations and fading.

Cross examinations are now much less buggy: hidden statements work properly, and resume doesn’t get screwed up by successive goto commands. I am not positive, but I think almost any cross examination situation can be taken care of without ugly work arounds. If I am wrong, please inform me

Fading is still poor, there is a significant frame delay before things fade, but it doesn’t result in objects getting progressively darker each time they are shown. I am not terribly interested in working on this issue in beta 10 any longer. This series’ opengl model is flawed, forcing me to stick with software rendering, which is VERY slow for anything with alpha transparency. I may be able to make the load time for fades a bit lower though. Beta 11 will have strong opengl support making this issue moot.

There are a few other nice tidbits in beta 10.94, update today!

Here’s the full changelog:

PyWright Beta 10.94
    - Some more fixes to hidden statements
    - Fix to gui mouse event handler, next button sometimes hard to click (thanks StBacchus for helping
        pinpoint this longstanding bug!)
    - Add the "random" command to generate random numbers. "random x 1 10" will set x to a number
        from 1 to 10.
    - The underscore character in nametags/character names will translate into spaces when the
        name is printed
    - The nametag bar expands horizontally to fit the width of the nametag
        (The 3 image files, nt_left, nt_middle, and nt_right in art/general control how each part of
        the name bar looks. The nt_left controls the left corner, nt_middle is repeated along
        the length of the bar, and nt_right is displayed on the right corner.)
        You can add arbitrary spacing in the name (extra padding) by adding spaces at the beginning
        or end of the nametag: char guy nametag=_______Guy_______" will have a longer
        name bar.
    - safety mode for resolution changes, will revert back after a few seconds if the change is not OK'ed
    - fading does not corrupt the original image (fixes ever darkening lists)
    - black fade in for lists and investigation buttons is back in single screen mode (and optionally in
        double screen mode, if _double_screen_list_fade is true)

Roadmap

The test game for beta 10.94 is not yet up, I am going to work on making it a much clearer test game than previous test games. In the past, the test games are little more than a way for me to make sure specific features are working as advertised, but people have argued that they want the test games to communicate something to users as well. The beta 10.94 test game should be out soon.

The next priority is on improving the website and adding more documentation and support for new users. PyWright works pretty well once you learn it, but learning it can still be insurmountable for some people. The focus for the next few weeks is on the tutorials, of which I am being helped by a few kind people; making a nicer formatted version of doc.txt that is easier to navigate, and finishing the ace attourney online converter. This is likely going to take the next few weeks to a month.

There will also most likely be a few more engine releases in the beta 10 series, still mostly focused on fixing bugs. There are some bugs logged for beta 10.95 already. I am trying to find a good transition into beta 11. There will likely be a time where both beta 11 and beta 10 are being supported for some time, as beta 11 will be behind in some ways. I am hoping to get that out before the end of the year, but it remains to be seen if that will happen. It is hard to judge how far along I am, I could be just a few bugs away from finishing, or there may be many new features that I want to include before releasing it.

To recap: documentation/new user aids first, continuing beta 10 series releases, and continually marching forward on beta 11 progress.

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Marching ever forward, the beta 10 series shows no signs of stopping. The more that gets added, the more that needs to be fixed. As I said in the court-record announcement, I do hope this is the last beta 10 release. I don’t think beta 11 will ever come out if I continue to support beta 10 indefinitely. If only I could clone myself!*

*But then I would have to eat twice as much, and could not afford it, so maybe I’ll hold off on the cloning

More info in the forum post!

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This is the new website for PyWright.  If you don’t know what that is, it is a tool and game engine which allows the creation of visual novel style adventure games, focusing on emulating the style of Ace Attorney from Capcom.

The site has been a long time in coming, not because it is terribly difficult to create a site, but because it is difficult as a one-man-band to develop a quality website while also developing a game engine. Still, I should have made it some time ago – the 20 page comment thread that has been the main source of PyWright information is taxed.

I hope the new website can be a valuable resource for PyWright users to get access to future content as I make it available.  The first item on the list of important content are some tutorials, of which I am very close to finishing the first.

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