There's been some minor changes to teh scenery since the screenshot in my previous post. For starters, the little plants aren't really scaling well with the world, and, on that note, neither do the ferns, tough I intend to make larger ones to help it be a bit believable. Hopefully. Not op priority at the moment. For now, little ones have been converted to objects, which wiggle a bit when the player touches them. These object will eventually have other uses, such as hiding foes and items (in theory - it really shouldn't be hard to set up).

Not important.

On the note of items, what IS important is that I've started the inventory screen on the sub-menu. It's not ready for the world yet, but general plan is this: A list of party members and the bag are along the top, and you can have any pair of these up to five inventory lists open at once. there's ten slots per person and fifty in the bag. With my lackluster item creation this should serve a fairly minimal issue for anyone who likes to sell loot. I originally intended to have the bag able to store multiples, but I'm not sure how well that would work at present, sadly. I could do it, but the extra memory it would consume is something I debate the value of. It seems petty until you realize… that's 50 integers to keep track of that normally aren't there, and more code to work into this screen (for a special case, no less - no matter what, individuals can only carry ten items, and slots only hold one of each). By having two lists open, you can move items between them or what have you. Use/Drop will be worked out after this, as it's a bit harder and the visual checks aren't up yet, and debug is… intrusive, honestly.

In any case, to wrap up inventory management, equipped weapons/armor won't be counted as your ten items, so in truth I guess you carry up to 12…?

I've got it started, but don't expect much more on it for a bit as I'm not going to be home for a few days and the laptop is,a s I've said before, out of commission for the time being.

As for those wanting a demo… Sorry, not ready. I know you want to judge how fun the game is or whatever, but I don't think you'll get that from a still broken battle system and some improved walking around and menu work from the old demo. I know it seems like I've added a lot, and in truth I think I have, but most of it is stuff you're not going out of your way to see - all these menus are about useless in a simple overworld demo, and until battle works, you'll probably never care to get into them. Never mind that I still don't have inventory stuff totally functional or what have you - in fact, most players would probably just, at this point, see that I've added an up animation for Zenith, added a couple minor things, wonder what the heck's up with the random windmill, and then complain that the battle test won't even launch because I've not fixed it from my variable tweaks yet, because… I'm not doing that until the back systems are set in stone, as that adds up to a lot of time wasted on fixin anything I've changed. The scripts eliminate a lot of this now, but not all of it.

So, sorry, no demo for some time yet. In fact, I'm not sure the next release would even be considered a "demo" if it's just the engine, because at present it's hardly even considered playable, and won't be until all the pieces come together. And if the pieces are all together, it's technically complete, isn't it? As far as engines go, anyway.

In short, I'm always getting closer to the next release, but that release isn't coming until I think you'll have enough there to keep you busy for more than thirty seconds. Otherwise, I think most of the window customization and such that I was proud of in the first place… is in the uploaded, out-of-date thing in my games folder, which I've oft been tempted to delete because it wasn't ready, I just wanted to show off the depth of the user settings.

Ah, well.

I hope that clears up why you're being kept waiting?