Hello again, world! In my last update , I covered the final pieces of the foundation for Shaftworks VNgen, which I aim to make one of the most advanced and easy to use visual novel engines ever. I said that with the core components in place, development would pick up quickly for the rest of the engine. And this weekend, I'm happy to report that's exactly the case. So strap on your seatbelts, because we've got quite the haul of new features to go over! Around the engine in...well, a lot of ways First off, I'd like to take a moment to highlight a few core changes that were made after the last post went out. At the time, I stated that each VNgen entity would come with 80 built-in values that largely could be customized by the end user. But in fact, when all was said and done, that figure increased even more to 95. Ok, so it's a big number. But what does that mean, exactly? Well, to put it simply, whether you're talking a textbox, a character, a background, or pre...

Hello, world! It's that time again—two weeks have passed, and now it's time for another update! For VNgen, the past two weeks have been all about polishing up the foundations so that work can finally begin on adding new elements to the system. Sound boring? Well, you might just be surprised. Around the Engine in 80 Ways So, a bit of context: as opposed to Edge VN, which generated the majority of its properties in real time (i.e. in CPU), VNgen relies heavily on data structures in memory (i.e. in RAM). For the end user this is particularly significant because it removes the line limit imposed on Edge VN—no more do you have to worry about bogging down the CPU with too many strings at once. You could even run an entire visual novel in a single object. For me as the developer, however, it means the added challenge of memory management, which requires a lot of planning and organization. (And when changes are made, lots and lots of intricate, manual adjustments. Ouch.) When I first...