Lassie SuperSheep: peanut gallery may comment
K, I'm just gonna make it official: I AM building a new version of the Lassie engine. It's called SuperSheep. Yes, that is a tribute to the classic game, "Worms Armegeddon". I've been tinkering with some concept application design since getting back from Europe last fall. I started off building it in AS2 while making drastic improvements to my personal approach to Object Oriented Programming (OOP) design. I've since moved on from those tinkerings and started building them into a full-blown new engine build using AS3, which is night an day different from the old AS2 architecture (it has to be, AS3 is its own beast). It's cool. It's looking good, though it's not done. Far from it. It has no timeline and will be released when I finish it... whenever that may be. I make no promises, so you should have no expectations. However, I'm giving the peanut gallery this one chance: Tell me what you want. I get supreme veto power, If I don't feel like adding your idea, I wont. No offense. However, our community has come up with some good ideas that HAVE made it into this build of the engine (speed matrix and parallax scroll being two), so I'm open to hearing what you folks have to say. You have a week. Go. Later, I'm gonna ignore further ideas as the engine gets more and more stable and less and less likely to change. Cheers!

Off the top of my head, customisable loading screens? I do like the blue (and I also think you should have SOME sort of stamp on every game made by Lassie, but maybe something more inconspicuous?) but often its SO different from the style or colours used in the games and can be quite jarring. Thats my tuppence anyways. :D So is SuperSheep (LOVE the name!) replacing Shepherd?

TIMes variable working dumbed down documentation (i get a feeling a few of us might need it!), walk on to hotspots triggering events Player/loader options as above (you really need a logo of some sort) inventory design options TBH I'd be quite happy with the just the annoying problems from Lassie AS working, ie sound dialog, erratic character animation, missing convo lines, and more stablity online

I realize this is a WISH list, but here goes: -embedding font support (not sure how possible that is, but being able to just select fonts that are installed on my computer, and then having them embedded on export. Also being able to alter sizes of fonts. Like character dialog could be a certain size, different from the rollover hotspot font size. Maybe even able to change font size for dialogue, like if a character yells and you want the font to be bigger on screen that regular dialogue. -some version of translated dialogue support. I believe it was suggested that all character dialogue could be read from a separate text file. That way, if you wanted to translate your game to another language, you'd just need to translate that text file with all the dialogue. The engine would read the textfile for whatever language the user sets to play the game in, and viola! -ability to turn dialogue on/off. If a game has voices and the player doesn't want to see the text on screen, they can disable it. -fixed game window view (not sure how else to describe this). With LassieAS, if you scale the window while playing through Flash Player, anything in a room that normally appears off screen (ie, a scrolled room, or the inventory bar when close) becomes visable. I'd like some cosmetic solution that makes sure if a user scales the window so it's not proportionate to the size the game's made at, they don't see "behind the scenes." Maybe that can be done with a mask or something, so no matter how they stretch the window, they still only see what the developer intended them to see. -debug window (or log or something along those lines.) It would be nice to see, when the game is running, what the engine is actually doing. With LassieAS, I'm encountering a lot of instances where it seems wait TIMe's are ignored, and the #true toggle is skipped in playAnim TIMe's. It would be great if there was a log of sorts that could show if TIMe's are being skipped, or whatever. -changePhase +/- (maybe advancePhase?): something to change the phase of a sprite in relation to its current phase, instead of a specific phase number. -returnToRoom: basically a variable I guess. Something that would make it easy to do something like, if the character has a note/map/photo in his inventory, and you want the player to be able to "look" at it, bringing up a new room that's a close up of the item, when they exit that screen it will return to whatever room they had been in (and remember the floor point they were at.) As it is, it's easy to code a changeRoom TIMe into an inventory item, but it's hard to configure it so the player will go back to exactly where they were. -Universal, game-wide sprites (ie, available in every room, as opposed to sprites that are room-specific): similar scenario as above. Say I want an image, like a close up of a photo, to display when the player clicks on an inventory item, and I want them to be able to look at it in whatever room they may be in. Instead of a room change, it's just a large sprite. But I don't want to have to place that sprite in every room, especially because if one change is made to it in one room, you'd have to go back and make a change to it in every room. -more copy/paste support (for some reason, I can't copy and paste dialogue. TIMe's I can cut and paste between windows, though.) -drag and drop phases/dialogue/rooms/etc.: Too often I've written dialogue and then want to add a line BEFORE it, but can't. I can add a line after it, but then I have to retype the first line in the second line. It'd be nice if I could at least choose where in the dialogue list to add the new line. Same with being able to move rooms/inventory around in the editor, at least just for organizational purposes. -set or remembered inventory placement, or possibly phases for inventory items: right now, if the character has an inventory item that changes, it changes to a whole new inventory item. Instead of the new item appearing in the same location in the inventory as the old one, it's at the end. It would be cool if it were possible to choose where within the player's inventory an item was placed (ie, say the player has a can of soda as the first item in their inventory, and they've got a dozen items after that. When they open the can, the new open can would still appear as the first item in the inventory, instead of the last.) OR, if inventory items had phases, the placement within the inventory would easily be remembered, and just the graphic and descriptions and whatnot of the item would be updated. -instant room exit: a lot of AG players get frustrated with games where you can't double-click (or something) on an exit and just cut right to the next room. I can see how making the character walk from one side of the room to the other can get tedious for players. It would be nice if the developer could choose if/when/how an exit hotspot would make the player walk to it, or exit the room right away. -more verb coin disc options: this might just be something up to the user, but being able to choose from a two verb/three verb/four verb coin disc would be cool. Not really necessary, though. -more default text options: agin, this isn't really necessary, but would be a nice option. Right now, if I use an inventory item on a sprite or an NPC and there's no custom interaction for it, it displays the inventory item's default dialogue. It would be cool if you could have it display default dialogue for the sprite (ie, I've got a hammer and try to give it to an NPC. Instead of "a hammer won't help there", I want it to say "He's not going to want that." While I can already accomplish that by just adding an interaction for using the hammer on the NPC, I want the "He's not going to want that" response for every inventory item, and coding all of those would be a lot of bloat. -apply to all phases: say I've got a sprite already with 5 or 6 phases, and I need to add in interaction to all of them. It'd be nice to be able to do that to one phase and have the option for it show up in all of them. It'd be easier to go back and delete it from a phase I didn't want it on then to add it manually to each one. -hover sprites: sprites that will stay put on screen, even if the screen scrolls (as opposed to scrolling with the screen). I think that's self explanatory. -trapezoidal walk areas: by golly I'd love more freedom with walk areas. Even better would be if you could just draw whatever shape you wanted and have it be a walk area, instead of it having to be a mess of rectangles. -Startpoint-specific enterRoom TIMe's: not super needed as there are ways around this, but it'd be cool if the enterRoom TIMe depended on what startpoint the character entered on. -enterRoom TIMe dialogue options: just being able to have a character say something when they enter a room, instead of having to set up a specific sprite, would be a nice little addition. But again, there are already ways around this. Umm... I think that's it from me for now. I'm trying to recall if there were other things I came up with in the previous wish list threads, but I think I got all the important stuff.

2. Not a chance. If anything, using SuperSheep will be more technical. Simple truth is that I can't build a UI for everything; and everything that DOES go into a UI is one less thing that can't be altered by a developer, so gets ample complaints about OR Hows about a a editable demo game which is heavily commented, I learnt a lot by taking the Director version apart, a lot of game engine designers do this. When you do a job for a living, talk to people doing the same job they'll understand what your saying but us mere morals who aren't Flash designers kinda go ...DOH! but i guess it depends on the target user your aiming for

re: trapezoidal walk areas Is it not possible to have the engine do a hitTest against an invisible (ie, mask or something) user-defined shape to determine if a point is walkable to? Or would that just slow down playback?

Understandable. And regarding fonts, if I change the font in the conline.swf, rollover.swf, and speech.swf to some crazy font I have, will that font show up on other computers, or (since they probably don't have the actual font file) will it default to Helvetica or something? Just want to know if changing the fonts in those files should be limited to fonts that pretty much come installed on every computer. Committing to doing the whole glyph/kerning a font would probably be one of the last things I do. I'd rather get the rest of the game done first.

I think John was thinking along the AGS lines to control walkable areas, hotspots and walk behinds You draw the out line and fill with the area colour and set the scale value and whether you get scaling within the area like this Another way i've seen was a hidden mask layer for hot spots, its normally a small 8 bit png, 256 colour palette,.. its used quite a lot in cubic rooms, all you do is export a small image from the room, draw in an art program where you want the areas on a layer, delete the background, import the game palette use the colours in order and save, the engine then uses the palette order and actions asigned to it I'm no expert so i wouldn't know if any of this is possible in AS3

I dunno Nige, not to totally diss AGS... but that system kinda sucks. Graphic shapes / blocks produce chunky results. Case of point: the character snaps at obvious scale intervals when you pass between scale boxes (unless you manually paint pixel areas in a very tight gradation, which is just tedious). I think math based approaches are always better... while they sometimes take more setup, they're easier to define, alter, and produce a better/smoother visual.