I’m going on a 2 week vacation so there’s no point in delaying this. Therefore, here’s a new release. This one is big and includes lots of improvements and some additions everybody was asking for ( at least everybody that wrote to me ):

Also I have updated “My Name is Poncho” the Demo. Now it includes 3 scenes, mouse navigation ( showing the new A* pathfind method ) and keyboard navigation. You can download its sources from the download area and use them as tutorials.

You can also browse the new API reference from the link in the sidebar.

So what’s new ?

NEW

• Nicer object shadows, that fade away as the object moves away from the plane. Try jumping in the demo to see it in action.
• The Grid is now generated on-demand, only used cells are generated. No longer we create a huge array that covers the whole scene. This has a huge impact in both initialization time and memory usage, and makes possible to have much bigger scenes. Overall a great improvement in my opinion.
• Added Mouse translation coordinates and an A* pathfinding: all you need to program point-and-click  adventuring and Diablo clones.
• Added shadowQuality settings. Shadows are the main bottleneck of the engine, therefore there is a need to have quality options to adjust them to your requirements.
• Added the fMaterialTypes class, where you can find info on the available materials and how to use them
• Added the “fence” material
• New zSort algorythm. It is cleaner and faster, and I hope this one will work properly.
• You can now destroy unused scenes via fEngine.destroyScene(). This will allow you to free system resources.
• Added the “xmlObj” property to elements
• Added the “window” material.
• Added the “animated” property to fObjects, which allows some optimization.
• Added the fHole class, which gives control over holes in fPlanes. Now holes can be opened and closed.
• Added a Building Generator
• Moved generators to new package “helpful” outside the engine, as they really do not belong there.
• Sprite hierarchy is properly setup so you can add Mouse Events to fElements and the appropiate element receives the event.
• Materials now tile seamlessly along adjacent surfaces.

FIXES

• Fixed: The engine now assigns an internal unique ID to each element, and uses that id in internal hashtables instead of relying on the IDs you assign. This was causing lots of trouble.
• Fixed: “BOX Tag” from generators were ignored
• Fixed: Exception caused by shadow projection trying to calculate intersection between paralel lines.
• Fixed: Several shadow projection bugs.
• Fixed: Some collisions between objects were missed.
• Fixed: mathUtils.getAngle now returns values consisten with the engine’s coordinate system.

On an unrelated note, development of the engine ( and my personal life in general ) is being treatened by an insane addiction to La Mulana. Stay away while you stll can…