A new engine!

[CraigStern]

-- added the advanced Crossbowman skills Piercing Bolt and Grapeshot into the game.

-- when you press the Save Character button in the character creator, the created character is now distilled down to an XML node with all the attendant attributes and saved within PremadeUnits.xml for the current custom campaign.

-- if the game does not detect PremadeUnits.xml when it goes to save the character, it will create the file from scratch and save the character within it. If it does detect the file, it will simply add the new character on the next available line and save the file.

-- when adding a character to an existing PremadeUnits.xml, the game will check for an existing character with the same loadID; if it finds one, it will remove that character and add the new one in its place.

[CraigStern]

-- fixed a bug in the character leveler which caused low-level characters (and particularly level 1 or level 2 characters) to sometimes not receive all of their starting skills upon generation.

-- fixed a big in the "resume" button on the options screen.

-- fixed a bug that was preventing the game from displaying the images for generated main gauches.

-- fixed a crash bug when generating consumable items that grant unscaled experience.

[CraigStern]

Memorial Day weekend is over, and it's back to work!

-- created an animation showing the previous day passing into the next as each new day dawns.

-- created a new action: SetDaysPassed. This takes a single "operation string" parameter: an operation symbol, a colon, and then a value (e.g. =:2, +:1, r:10, and so on). The game applies the operation and the value to the current days passed. (Every campaign begins with days passed equal to 0 by default.)

-- created a new action: SetDate. You feed this action three integer parameters: the numbers for the day, month, and year when the game started. It then calculates the current date based on days passed, and passes the current day, month name, and year into the custom strings CalendarDay, CalendarMonth, and CalendarYear, respectively. (Note that the date generated and the names of the months are based upon the Cera Bellan calendar.)

-- renamed generated items with a GEN: prefix so as to avoid situations where a campaign-specific item of the same name overwrites it, producing errors in the shop. (E.g. the generated Kite Shield is now named GEN:Kite Shield, so that the game can distinguish it from the default, non-generated Kite Shield item that comes standard in most campaigns.)

-- if ItemGen produces a blank item (e.g. because the game couldn't find a matching item of the correct type), the shop will now skip over it instead of listing it.

--adjusted the character screen, level-up screen, and reserve supplies screen so that clicking outside the menu will register as a click to close the menu.

-- renamed the weapon properties "Well-balanced" and "Astonishing" to "Balanced" and "Peerless" for brevity's sake.

-- reduced the acceleration for screen-edge panning, and imposed a 4-second delay before allowing screen-edge panning after clicking a button in the actions bar. (These should hopefully eliminate the incidence of annoying, unwanted panning after clicking a button.)

-- fixed a bug in which the game would check to throw out a "No Targets!" message during an AI-initiated attack.

-- fixed a bug that would throw an error for players from proceeding to nighttime with 0 characters in their roster.

[CraigStern]

-- created "fade in from black" and "fade out to black" scene transition effects.

-- cut scene text only begins to animate once the fade in completes; scene transitions are now triggered at the conclusion of the fade out.

-- implemented fade-in and fade-out on all Unity scenes, providing a much smoother and more polished feel to all scene transitions.

-- created the UI framework for issuing nighttime orders.

-- implemented nighttime orders for group introductions and group practice. Both negatively impact the morale of all non-Golem units, but they provide benefits to compensate, a) making sure all units have no less than 5 familiarity with every other unit and b) giving all units 20 experience, respectively.

-- added the options menu to nighttime.

-- created a separate morale report screen for nighttime.

-- wrote a new description for nighttime for if you retire to camp alone.

-- fixed a typo in one of the approach lines, wrote new nighttime practice lines for religious characters, made some improvements to the nighttime practice lines for empirical characters.

[CraigStern]

-- created a map settings window in the map editor where you can edit the map's name, musictrack attribute, nextbattle attribute, winAura attribute, and objective(s).

-- created directional variations of every instance of the "3Tip," "XTip," "PJunc," "P2Junc," and "TJunc" terrain transitions for all basic terrain types.

-- implemented autotile detection routines for "tip" transitions (those that take account of each tile's diagonal cornering tiles).

-- the map editor now continuously monitors the map for whatever tileset is most common among all the tiles present. Whenever this "base tileset" flips to a different set, the editor now automatically re-bakes all of the tile transitions using the new set as the base.

-- fixed an issue in which the map editor would fail to select an appropriate variant for tiles bordered on an equal number of sides by two distinct tilesets.

-- the game now automatically selects the name input field when creating a new campaign in the campaign editor.

-- various bug fixes.

[CraigStern]

-- added a Surrender button to battle; when pressed, the battle is stopped, the player gets 25% of the aura he or she would have gotten if they'd won, and team morale drops by 2.

-- you can now click anywhere on the screen to remove the turn box and victory box in battle, not just on the boxes themselves.

-- cut the screen-edge panning activation areas in half; the cursor now has to be right on the screen edge to activate it.

-- fixed a bug in which players could move the camera around and interact with the things while the turn box remained onscreen in battle.

-- fixed a bug in which the game was showing the actions menu beneath the victory/defeat screen at the conclusion of battles.

-- fixed a bug where the game was clearing pop-up text before its animations finished.

[CraigStern]

-- created the New Unit selection window for the map editor. Available units are loaded from XML based on the current campaign, then displayed sequentially; clicking one selects it as the current character to be painted onto the map. (In an improvement over the original Telepath Tactics map editor, multiple pages of units are supported.)

-- filled out tile data for all of the dozens of new tile variations; corrected a numbering error with some of the existing tile data.

-- created a shadowy "portrait missing" portrait.

-- when the game cannot find a designated character portrait, instead of displaying a visually jarring white box, it now loads up the "portrait missing" portrait instead.

-- reduced the size of the map editor's palette chooser window to a more reasonable size reflecting the amount of terrain types actually available to paint.

[CraigStern]

-- rewrote a pointlessly convoluted and inefficient character lookup routine I wrote in the early stages of developing this engine, back when I was apparently on crack.

[CraigStern]

-- you can now click on tiles to place a copy of a unit there in the map editor when in New Unit mode.

[CraigStern]

-- the map editor now has a working New Object window that works in the exact same fashion as the New Unit window, but it loads destructible objects instead of characters. The selected objects can now be painted directly onto the battlefield.

-- added a "facing" field to the New Unit window. (It successfully picks the right direction if you fail to capitalize, or even if you totally mistype it, just so long as the first letter is correct.)

-- you can now paint player spawn points ("FromPlayerRoster") onto the battlefield in the map editor.

-- mousing over placed units in the map editor now produces a character tooltip, just as if they were in battle.

-- you can now click on placed units and destructible objects in the map editor to open a window that lets you edit their spawn turn, army, position, and facing, and lets you add tags and inventory items to them directly.

-- changed map editor behavior so that painting water, lava, and chasms is now super quick and easy; the maps now start out at elevation 1. Wherever you paint water, lava, or chasm tiles (provided the spot wasn't previously occupied by water, lava, or chasm tiles already), the elevation level now automatically sinks by 1, putting the waterline half a tile below ground level.

-- the map editor now properly loads tile data for tiles out of TileData.xml instead of using a hacky shortcut. (In related news, it now properly detects the appropriate height for spawning bridges over water, lava, and chasms.)

-- fixed a few outdated spriteSet values in PremadeUnits.xml.

[CraigStern]

-- the map editor now has a Conditions window within the map settings that allows you to hand-type up to 10 separate conditions applicable to the map.

-- the map editor now has working "delete units" and "delete objects" modes, in which clicking a unit / object (as the case may be) deletes it from the map.

-- updated map editor behavior with regard to placing and deleting units and objects so that you can click and drag to "paint" instead of having to individually click each tile.

-- updated map editor behavior with regard to editing tiles beneath units and objects so that you can click and drag to "paint" below them.

-- units and objects in the map editor now automatically reposition themselves to match when you adjust the elevation of the tile they are on.

-- began coding the procedure for saving maps as XML files.

[CraigStern]

-- the map editor can now save maps, correctly formatted with all relevant data (except for dialogue and scripts; I'll be adding those in later).

-- the game now successfully loads custom campaign maps!

-- the map editor, specifically, can now load custom campaign maps. It now contains a Load Map window which lets you select any map belonging to the current selected campaign (so long as it's a battle map and not a cut scene of some kind--the editor will let you know which ones are off-limits).

-- the unit properties window in the map editor now lets you add triggers to a unit.

-- alphabetized default premade objects for easier browsing in the map editor.

-- when you open a campaign in the campaign editor, it now lists your campaign's characters and maps right there on the screen; you can flip through them as "pages" to inspect them all.

-- fixed an oversight re: the game recognizing the "Either" value for the sex attribute when loading sprites.

[CraigStern]

-- you can now load existing characters to edit within the character creator! When you load a character, you can click backward through the various character creation stages to edit stuff; all of the auto-generation of stats and growths and such will be turned off, and you can save at any time.

-- there is now a New Character button in the character creator so you can make multiple new characters in a row (or simply make a new character after editing a loaded character) without having to back out to the campaign editor in between.

-- you can now select "Either" as a gender when using the character creator. This creates a character with a generic portrait whose gender is chosen at random every time they are spawned (a la the enemies in Telepath Tactics). The creator will remove the random name generation button for such characters.

-- fixed a variety of minor (and not-so-minor) bugs in the character creator.

[CraigStern]

-- the map editor will now successfully format and save Scripts contained within a map file when it saves the map.

-- the map editor will now successfully format and save Dialogue contained within a map file when it saves the map.

-- fixed a bug in which the map editor would overwrite elevation data in loaded maps with default elevation.

-- if you load a map containing units or objects not defined in the current campaign's PremadeUnits.xml file, instead of freaking out and crashing, the map editor now just skips over those units or objects and carries on.

-- fixed a small handful of bugs that were keeping the game from properly loading generic portraits for Either-gendered characters that had been loaded from PremadeUnits.xml.

[CraigStern]

-- the map editor's new object window automatically alphabetizes every object before listing them for easy browsing.

-- the map editor's new object window now has a search bar! When you type something in, the game will automatically narrow down the listed objects to a) those which start with the characters your entered in, followed by b) objects which have that sequence of characters appearing anywhere in their loadID.

-- the map editor's new object window now shows a preview of the last object whose name you moused over; this makes it a lot easier to see what you're selecting! (Unfortunately, this only works for sprite objects at the moment--there is currently no support for full 3D objects with this feature.)

-- finalized support for generated generic characters in the map editor; you can now customize more of their features as well. Generic generated can now be placed, saved, and loaded with maps.

-- unique generated characters are now loaded and saved properly in maps (though there is not yet a mechanism for actually placing them in the editor).