Posted July 03, 2019 by megamarc
Tilengine isn't dead by any means! But certainly I've focused more on GitHub and facebook news posting, whereas itch.io releases have been somewhat abandoned. There have been major features added since the previous update last year, briefly detailed here:
License changed (again!) from LGPL to more permissive Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2). In practice this means that Tilengine can be rebuilt from source and statically linked to a closed-source program. Console development requires this feature, as the older LGPL requires binary link of shared libraries, whereas console devkits ususally use statically-linked libraries.
https://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0
In addition to the traditional method loading of assets stored into individual, separate plain-text files, Tilengine can load AES128-encrypted asset packages. I've released a generic resource packer tool to ease distribution and protection of game assets inside a single file, and Tilengine can read these packages seamlessly just as if they were regular assets.
https://github.com/megamarc/ResourcePacker
New object layers are an hybrid between tiled layers and sprites: they act as a background layer, but they're composed of graphics contained inside a spritesheet, as sprites. They're useful to add decorations to a tiled layer. They can also be chained to another layer, so moving the parent layer automatically moves its attached objects layer, easing the scroll of complex setups. There's a new sample called Forest that demonstrates this feature.
https://github.com/megamarc/Tilengine/blob/master/samples/Forest.c
Built-in windowing now supports up to four simultaneous players, with up to 32 redefinable unique inputs each! Key bindings for closing window (Esc) and CRT effect toggle (TAB) can also be reassigned, or disabled.
Tilengine's native programming language is C. Bindings, samples and assets for other programming languages aren't released together anymore. Instead they're complete projects with their own documentation and samples, hosted on their own repositories: