Epok Engine Update 1

It's been quite a while, but I can assure you that the time has been spent inefficiently and on completely unrelated things. As usual, I can't give specifics on timelines, but I can at least say I'm making progress on the Epok Engine I mentioned a long time ago.

So a long while ago I thought up making the engine to support future development I quickly ran into a seemingly impossible to break wall when trying to merge a development pipeline between Chat Mapper and it's Lua scripts into flash. It was crazy talk, and was pretty discouraging when I found out this couldn't be done. Many months passed before I looked at this again after doing more professional level action-script work.

Still, I wanted to use Chat Mapper for its nice organization, so I chose to use it simply as dialog flow designer (which is what it should only ever be), and developed an entirely new system that uses an XML file filled with "Dialog Nodes". I built a python tool that is able to read in the XML and compile entire Class files containing all these nodes into native Action Script. Therefore I can run all sorts of events and triggers throughout the dialog navigation.


In terms of the Epok Engine's progress, it's now using a better UI backend that isn't horribly broken and has a fully functional and dynamic dialog and choice system. While it may not sound like much, this is pretty much all you need for the most basic of games. I plan on testing my text replacement system next, as well as getting the save/load system in early enough. I have some neat ideas to allow old saves to work well.

The immediate project goal is to be able to simulate the Chat Mapper Example project, which will prove the systems works and allow for additional fixes. What happens afterwards is pretty open on what I can do with the engine. I wont make any announcements yet as I don't want to get peoples hopes up too early.

I'll post again once I have something interesting to say.