the cold and dark december update

fellow wareware enthusiasts,

we are writing to you from our snow-covered cabin in the middle of the forest. winter is harsh and we are running out of firewood, but nevertheless we have gathered all our strength to send you this update. 

actually, it's not so bad, don't worry: we have enough Harry Potter books to burn :3

Attached to this letter is the latest version of wareware. There are so many new features and bug fixes to discover, yay!

this is version 0.11.0 btw, for anyone who is into this version numbers thing (ewww, weird, but ok)

 ❄️ a winter default tileset

since we are snowed in and forgot our crayons, we had to ask our community to draw a winter tileset for us. they did and it came out beautifully 😻😻 (they are the best)

big thanks to atlasoffline, bunp, Gerard and zichy for these wonderful graphics!

 ❄️ introducing the "game" tab

a new tab has appeared, it is situated on the right and it has a collection of old and new functions:

 global css

this is a big one for the css-criminals, and we hope our version updating system is handling this ok, if your game is quite css heavy it might be that you need to do a little bit of clean-up, sry 😵‍💫

BUT this is worth it, we swear!

- instead of every room having its own css crime scene, we have one big globals crime scene now! 

- from now on you can style the background of rooms by using their names as the css-class selector 

- you can also style message boxes of character by using their names as class selectors! write css once, reuse it as often as you want :)

- you can also style character voices??? 

for example to give this room named "cave" a linear gradient background we added

.cave {
background: linear-gradient(#a86935, #256684)
}

to make our character "gunter" talk with blue text we added

.gunter {
color: blue;
}

to the css crime scene:
 

game start actions are now in the game tab

game start actions were kind of lost in the save&export dialog, but they finally found a new home ♥️

 you can now change the character graphics without an action

doggo is the best character anyway, so this was not really needed, but maybe you wanted to dress them in a fancy suit?

 ❄️ new actions

we split the change room settings action into "change room settings" and "add css crimes".

"add css crimes" now adds css text to the global css during runtime 🛹

 ❄️ shadows

we finally managed to get the threejs cascading shadows working with our custom animation shader: what a battle! this means no longer weirdly clipping and jittery shadows and a nice fade-out when the shadows are too far in the distance!

this is quite heavy on performance so the cascade count is reduced for mobile right now. please give us feedback on how it works on your devices! 

❄️ some long due perfomance improvements

level meshes should now cull unseen faces and all tiles with one texture are now combined into one mesh, for way less draw calls, yay :)

 ❄️ texture filepicker now accepts png, jpeg and bmp

they worked before, but you had to fight the interface a bit. at one point we want to support gifs, but not now!

 ❄️ bugfixes

- the cursor is finally animated as it should be. no more weirdly stretched animation sheets 👀

- the version updater should go through every version now, not only the last

- no more blinking when the mouse leaves the graphic editor

- you can add assets in safari now!

- you can edit sound volumes in chrome without moving the action now!

 ❄️ what is to come:

we are eagerly awaiting spring in our cabin, and you are eagerly awaiting an undo/redo system and gamelogic options. Both will arrive, let's see which comes first 🏎️🏎️🏎️

as always, if you stumble upon bugs please share them with us either in the wareware comments or on our discord.

sincerely,

your wareware dev team

picmix by Mollycat2020