Starting this weekend, I'll be going on a week-long vacation, so my activity might drop for the next week. Fortunately, I will have access to my calculator and my laptop, so I'll do my best to get some progress on my projects. After all, long car drives can lead to wondrous coding sprees.  After I get back, my activity should be OK, though it may falter, as my Eagle Project should be happening during the end of July.

I'll probably be focusing on Nostalgia, as I'd really like to crank out a demo of that before focusing on something else entirely, because I believe some real progress on it is way past overdue.

As for the progress I hope to make with Nostalgia, I'll be looking at the ASCII mapping engine, and something I still want to be a surprise, as well as a dynamic border system. The dynamic border system would replace the scroll-like borders in most everything (the conversation text box will like remain as the scroll-like border), but it should save a boatload of memory in the long run, because all the borders won't be hard-coded in. For the old, very unoptimized, in-game menu, I was using several thousand bytes of space just for the borders and menu layouts. It was a nightmare. I may even have a completed dynamic border system somewhere in my Pokemon TCG source, so I'll see if I can't find that, as it would make this even easier. The borders will be a simpler design, but I think they'll still look pretty good. As for the surprise, if it goes well, I hope it will make Nostalgia a bit more immersive.

Have fun and I hope you still plan to stay with us afterward.

FinaleTI, good luck with Nostalgia and enjoy your vacation Have fun!

That's awesome!  Great job, Finale.

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After all, long car drives can lead to wondrous coding sprees

I've never been able to get that to work for me...i always get distracted with something or another

Exodus came out of one of those, and hopefully most of Cube Droid will come out of another.

Maybe snowstorm effects using my sandstorm effect?

Maybe a level in which there's a blizzard?  Or in the middle of a boss battle?

EDIT: hmm, might it be possible to make the weather stuff grayscale?

gray would definitely help, but there's no way he's getting it to work with that engine. i like the way the weather looks, but have to agree about the speed of things. if it were just a bit faster (and maybe masked) the snow especially would look a lot cleaner. i like the effect as a whole, though (as well as the day/night idea) and think it could add a lot of depth. nice work with the updates and good luck with dynamic windows.

I'll have to agree with what most of the others have said. I think the weather effects are a nice addition, but they seem too slow. I'm not sure because it's been a while since I've seen pics of the game engine, but do they slow down the mapper as a whole as well? At any rate, I'd try to adjust the weather, and possibly seem if you can find some optimizations to speed the tilemapper itself up a bit.

I think the idea of day and night sounds cool, but how will it work into gameplay? Will shops/ places be closed during the night? Will there be different enemies out and about? How much space will such changes take? While I *do* think it's a cool idea, but I'm really unsure if it would fit well or add anything to Nostalgia.

Lastly, I hope you have a wonderful vaction! =)