[-SJ Zero]

You're absolutely right about the VDM. I'm not sure how, but Win2k is a universe more stable with DOS apps, which is the opposite of what I've been told, strangely enough. Have you tried VDMsound with XP? I know it allowed me to have music in my game in 2k, along with the built-in gamepad support without problems. Maybe it can help XP. Personally, I'm not going to be using XP long enough to care, so I'm probably just going to code a workaround which disables sound if XP is detected.


As for your suggestions, once again, the suprising flexibility of the JRPG engine is bogged down by my own inability or unwillingness to use it. Let me elabourate:

All the drawing and stuff is ALREADY done while the text scrolls. That's why the rain can fall while you're talking. The biggest problem in making it possible to move while they talk would be trying to figure out how to handle the rest of the world which I can avoid right now by just keeping the main character still. For all the work needed, it simply wouldn't be worth it.

Character movement is something I want to do right the second time(I already tried it once with FF style movement, and I hated it very much). Instead of doing solutions which look good on paper like those, I'm trying to design a system which will allow NPCs to move in a variety of ways, such as traversing waypoints, which could be used to make NPCs seem as if they are doing something by giving NPCs a sort of objective checklist to be done every "day". I also want to combine advanced NPC AI systems with other routines to make intelligent enemies, which I think could really spice up gameplay, including the possibility of stealth missions. The thought of travelling through a town stealthily trying to avoid a lynch mob is really appealing to me, from a gameplay point of view.

As for multikey, it is in there, but I converted the character movement system into an object behaviour, which works really nicely, and makes it so character animation is done by default, but I need to make more behaviours for diagonal movement. I hope to have that set up by the next demo.

Thanks for trying the new demo. I'll see what I can do towards the collision detection, though I can't make too many promises. :)

[-SJ Zero]

Oh yeah...and the delay is on that screen because it's supposed to play the One Man Army Games jingle. It only takes 6 seconds to play, then it heads to the title screen.