Just a quick post to list some of the changes/additions that will be part of v1.3:

• New internal structure for the engine (99% backwards compatible ).
• Internal methods are reorganized per functionality. No longer the element classes have collision methods, visibility methods, etc, etc. Now elements only contain their properties and you have a collisionSolver, a visibilitySolver, etc etc. It makes the engine easier to extend, as you don’t add more lines to an already overbloated file. It also means files easier to understand and modify.
• New extendable render engine interface, separated from logical calculations such as collisions. In the future, this will allow writing an specific flash 10 renderer or a papervision renderer, for example.
• PathFinding now uses an fEnginePathFindCriteria interface, so users can write their custom pathFind behaviours.
• Implemented scene.removeCharacter()
• Significant shadow rendering optimizations. Quality settings other than BEST now perform almost as if there were no shadows at all.
• Added character-character collision.
• Only the displayed scene has its graphical assets created. The other scenes are active but are nothing but some variables and objects, and take very little resources. You could have several scenes running at the same time, keeping consistency with a server, with characters moving from one scene to the other. If the scene the character enters is the one being displayed, the character’s graphics assets are created. In the meantime it stays as a bunch of variables.
• Occlusion will be a property of characters, not cameras, and will have a new render method. I wasn’t sattisfied with the old one and besides it was very cpu-consuming.
• Line of sight: is Point A is visible from point B ? What is within my range of vision ?
• Bullets. Yep, finally. You create them and simple listen to SHOOT events in your elements.

With this I’ll be very close to my initial vision of the engine. Of course there are endless features one could add, but I never thought I’d made it this far anyway.