OMG HAMSTAPOWAH UPDATE.

I've kept busy the past couple of days with this one. The battle system is in very early development (yes, kids, the new one), and in turn some of the core system has been altered, as well. Active parties can now consist of up to fifteen people, should that interest anybody, consisting of three primary rows of up to five characters each. Beyond this, you can now have as many characters in a party as you've RAM to store stats for, though don't expect this out of anything I generate soon. the fifteen active limit may be hard enough to meet, as, at present, I've maybe 7 or 8 characters in mind that can join your group, five of which are required. I do enjoy a good side quest.

Because of this, my concerns with the game having way too much menu time have become all the more justified. I've eliminated individual inventories, as it simply becomes too much clutter in need of organization and fore planning on the player's part. To make up for this loss of storage space, two things have been done: items are now categorized into one of four sections (Item, Weapon, Armor, and Special), and, save for special items, you can now store multiples of an item in one slot. At present, there is no cap for how many of an item you can have at a time, spare the max limit of GM's integers, but that will likely change as I get the scripts involved with adding items more fleshed out. In battle, anyone can access the Item bag and use it's contents on anyone, including themselves, in range. this should reduce menu time considerably. :)

And, with that, we now have…

Yes, the new Inventory screen! At present, it only allows you to look at what you have, but in the end it will probably replace the equip menu entirely (not that that ever got done to begin with… >_>), as well as let you sort, use, and drop items.

And this is just the stuff a player can see right off. I've done quite a bit with the code, as well, such as reorganizing inventory to be more memory-efficient, breaking things, fixing what I've broken… all sorts of fun. Next on the list? Getting those darn treasure chests to work! From there I can jump into all sorts of stuff through the external event system, which will (hopefully) not drop the frame rate to 4 like the external item system did. >___>

Speaking of which, Joystick control has been removed, because apparently if it's enabled and no joystick is installed (as of installing my nifty PS2.GC/XBox converter thing), the game drags. I will likely add an enable option for it, as it needed a config menu anyway, as no two sticks seem to have the same button numbers assigned to the same places, save maybe L and R. Or so I've come to learn.

Here's to hoping for good things in the future. Wish me luck!