Beta v.9

v.9?  Sure, why not.

The first draft of the documentation is finished.

As I said last time, the process of documentation really clarified how things should work, and many changes were made as a result.  The biggest change for this last pass is that Events can now accept string arguments; any number of them.  This should reduce the individual number  of events that need to be registered, and what those events are capable of.  Further, events can control whether they should fire even if the text was forced to be finished typing all at once.  Some things shouldn't ever be skipped, some things it's probably okay to skip.  Now you can choose.

The other big change is with the onDraw functions.  Previously, onDraw fired before the text actually rendered.  This made it difficult to put extra effects on top of your characters without getting a particle system involved.  Now we have onDrawBegin: which fires before the element is drawn; good for adjust the style of the element leading up to drawing.  And we have onDrawEnd: which fires after the element; good for stacking effects on top of the already drawn element.

In addition, the step count argument of onDraw functions will take onDraw chain breaking into account.  So if a previous onDraw prevented a subsequent onDraw from running for 30 steps, when it finally does run, it's step count will be 0 instead of 30 as it would have been previously.

So, where are we now?  I'd love to say that this is it: this is Scripture, but we all know that's probably not true.

As I begin writing the more exciting and intricate demo project showing off all of it's features, I'm sure I'll find bugs and features that just don't work as well as they should or aren't as convenient as they should be.  Hopefully some beta users will give me some feedback on this as well.  I'm sure I'm missing some pretty basic features that just... didn't occur to me.  I have a few ideas of what those might be, but I'm hoping I've got most of it covered.

Once the demo project is finished, that will be v1.0 and barring any critical issues brought up by early adopters, I will go into full release here on Itch and on the GM Marketplace.

Thanks for reading