3.6.1 is planned to be a minor version, focusing on improving performance and usability of existing features, and also possibly on restoring few functionalities cut while porting the engine to SDL2.
Changes in 3.6.1 - Beta 1
Editor:
- Made Editor a Dpi-aware application, which might improve its looks in Windows 10 and higher.
- Implemented Log Panel that lets you see the engine and game logs right in the Editor.
- Added "Restore all sprites..." command to the Sprite Manager's context menu (this duplicates the "File -> Recreate sprite file" menu command added previously).
- Refresh Sprite Manager after fully recreating a sprite file.
- Fixed a minor memory leak occuring when editing a tree item's label in Project Explorer.
Engine:
- Significant performance improvement to scripts. Script running speed restored to a level close to AGS 3.2.1. Testing few "script-heavy" games showed fps raise by up to 30-40% compared with 3.6.0 engine.
- WFN font renderer now supports unicode texts in utf-8.
- Ensure that character and object scaling is updated even when the game is not drawn. This fixes rare issues when their scale property did not update in time whilst the game was completely fadeout, and similar cases.
- Ensure all the script API is now correctly available for the plugins.
- Engine will now log a warning for the most incorrect parameters to Animate function instead of quitting the game.
- Fixed "bad script stack" error could be sometimes displayed if the game was aborted in the middle of running a script.
- Fixed script behavior in case a local variable was assigned a value without being initialized with a zero memory by compiler's intruction beforehand. This is not a problem with the standard compiler, but technically could be an issue with any custom implementation.
Compatibility:
- In Editor, restored all the Character's variables available in "backward-compatible" mode. This is primarily to make it easier to import very old games.
- Fixed slower character walking speeds in pre-3.1 upscaled and high-resolution games.
- Allow to run an animation over a loop with zero frames, by using the placeholder frame. This lets particular old games to continue running instead of crashing with error.