Scrolling Game Development Kit 2.3.0 Release Notes

This release is being published in 2 forms:

1. SGDK230.zip contains all the files necessary to run the program with no installation needed. Just extract and run wherever you like. This is similar to other revent releases of SGDK2.
2. SGDK230_Installer.zip contains an installation program that will create shortcuts, and an un-install program like a typical Windows installation program.

Changes between version 2.2.10 and 2.3.0

1. Add support for real-time lighting effects including:
   • Allow light sources to be defined by creating sprite definitions whose Base Class is set to LightSpriteBase instead of SpriteBase.
   • Light source falloff settings allow fine control over how quickly the brightness of a light source falls off over distance.
   • Light source aperture settings allow a light source sprite to direct its light instead of shedding light in all directions, and allow the width of the light cone to be adjusted and have crisp edges or soft edges.
   • Light source aim allows a light to be pointed in a particular direction.
   • Light Z position allows positioning the light a specified distance away from the screen to spread its light over a greater range more equally.
   • Allow the tiles that a light sprite sees as solid to cast 2D shadows, preventing the light from illuminating anything on the far side of solid tiles. (Of course an ambient light, for example, can still cast light over a whole layer by having no solidity.)
   • Allow normal maps (aka bump maps) to be defined for all graphics so that their appearance can change with the direction of the lighting.
   • Allow light sources to be rotated at run-time with a rule functions.
   • Add a Lighting property to each layer that allows lighting to be enabled or disabled per layer at design time or run-time.
   • Apply normal map effects to graphics in all views at design time as well as run time (to allow graphics that differ only by normal map to be distinguished at design time).
   • Allow lighting's effect to be determined by the alpha channel of the normal map so that transparent pixels in the normal map can represent self-illuminated pixels on the graphic.
   • Add Real-time Lighting Effects Tutorial to walk new users through creating a project with all lighting effects active.
2. Re-introduce an installation program to make installing and un-installing SGDK2 a more typical experience.
3. Update the graphics framework to use shaders instead of deprecated OpenGL drawing functions. This allows real-time lighting and theoretically many other special effects. See the shaders.cs file in the SourceCode tree.
4. Implement new display modes that scale up the graphics by a factor of 2 (horizontally and vertically) at runtime for retro pixelated look.
5. Add new display mode for 1920x1080.
6. Implement zoom feature in graphics editor's tiling preview.
7. Add new 16x zoom level to graphics editor.
8. Implement lighting and scaling in map editor.
9. Add an option to allow the map editor to automatically size to the defined game window size so that you can be sure that the map editor shows the same size view as the run-time game window, and scrolls the same way.
10. Allow the Solidity setting of a sprite to be cleared to nothing in the map editor.
11. Improve handling of fatal errors to increase the likelihood that users get an option to save their project if a fatal error occurs, before the program shuts down.
12. Fix some bugs that appeared in certain circumstances when using the Door function.
13. Correct the size of the find dialog in the code editor.
14. Upgrade to OpenTK 2.0.0.0
15. Upgrade to .NET 4.5, dropping support for Windows XP and one-click install, which wasn't working out.
16. Add sprite template LeftRightFlatHtml that implements the same behavior as LeftRightFlat, but works in HTML5 projects.
17. Correct bug in HTML5 project's handling of TargetDistance during FollowPath.
18. Correct bug in HTML5 project's implementation of drawCounterAsTile related to calculating the correct offset based on the layer position.