Posted September 06, 2021 by pink productions
Okay, yes, I did say I was gonna update the tutorials and write some new ones. But then I got distracted by shiny new functionality.
In this case, the shiny new functionality is followers. Followers are characters that follow the PC around, representing party members and such. They don't interact with the world around them (unless you make them do so in a cutscene), but are only there as a visualization of someone or something following the player around. Followers do not have movement rules, allowing the player and NPCs to pass through follower-occupied spaces without issue. Followers are set to render 1 layer below the default NPC layer, so other characters always appear to pass over them. Test room B-18 was added to demonstrate this functionality, as well as give developers some insight in how to use followers in their own code.
There is some additional functionality in this release too, all things that I needed to implement to make followers work. Moving objects now remember their previous coordinates, and you can give one object the instruction to move to the previous coordinates of another object using the new 'prev_coord' variable for the 'go_to' command. The target string for 'go_to' commands now undergoes code evaluation, allowing it to target members of lists, or attributes of objects. Finally, sprite collection objects can now be given the 'move_to' and 'move_from' properties. This property, when set, overrides the properties of the same name for animation sets of these sprite collections.