Well, today was mostly a sprite ripping and planning day. I got a bit of programming done as well, but I’ve been more looking over the old code and seeing what can be improved.

For one, there is no longer any need to separate the classes for Players and Enemies as far as code goes. They both run off scripts, its just one is controlled by keyboard input and another is by an AI. I have different controlling classes to handle that.

It took awhile to figure how to strip maintenance of Navis/Viruses (What I define as “Net Entities”) from the battle field class as far as position goes. I figure to just have the battle field compare their positions directly (each net entity stores its own row and column position), rather than store them in an array representing the field and comparing positions that way.

My aim is to have this out by March, but we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be releasing a version that can be played directly from this website and a version that can be downloaded and customized.

Hopefully by the end of next week I’ll have screenshot material of the new engine. That way all of my updates will actually be interesting .

I’m taking many different approaches this time around.

The first of which is that the Battle System now manages all resources. The first time around, The Battle System just managed the flow of the game, pretty much just switching phases. It held a Chip Menu, Battle Field, Music, and Sound effects. The Battle Field held and managed all of the Battle Panels, Navis/Viruses, and Attacks. It became a problem having to send scripts from the Chip Menu through 2-3 classes just to get to the Navis.

What I’m doing this time is separating the Battle Field from the entities and letting the battle system manage it. The Battle Field will only manage the Battle Panels, telling the system whether an entity can move there or not and sending any scripts a panel may have.

I’ve also strip script handling completely away from Navis/Viruses and Attacks as well. They will pretty much only hold sprite information and information on what to do when a certain action button is pressed.

This will make it much easier to keep track of scripts, which definitely will help when it comes to putting online battling back in.