Pixel Vision 8 v0.9.0 Is Now Feature Complete

Today marks an important day for the next release of Pixel Vision 8. Castpixel and I have finalized all of the designs for the tools I plan on releasing for v0.9.0 at the end of next month. While I've posted previews of some of the new tools I've been working on, there are a few more I haven't talked about at all.

Last week I rebuilt the all-new Music Tool. This is based on the existing tool but has a new song building area.

I'll be updating the SDK shortly to support adding songs that are collections of patterns (previously called loops). Currently in PV8 v0.8.0, if you wanted to play a full song, you would have to supply an array of loop IDs manually. This will change in the next release, and you will need a song ID to playback music in your game.

I also worked on the foundation for the new Tilemap Tool. This still requires a bit more work to be functional but the core UI is now in place.

You'll be able to preview all the available sprites, change the tile size from 8x8 to 16x16, 24x24, and 32x32 similar to how the new Sprite Tool works.

Lastly, I started working out the prototype for the all-new File System. This will be the heart of Pixel Vision 8 and where you'll spend the most time managing your game's files.

I'll talk about this one in future posts. There is still a bit of work to do, but since Castpixel and I just finalized the last of the icons, it shouldn't take me long to wrap up.

I'm going to keep posting weekly progress updates here as I get everything ready to launch. The goal is to have all the tools, including the two un-announced ones, ready by the end of the month. This will give me all of November to finalize the shared logic like saving, menus, and bug fixes. Once everything is stable, I'll release a preview build to Pro and Early Adopter members. Finally, when the build is more stable, I plan on releasing it more generally sometime toward the end of December.

Hope you enjoy, I'm very excited to finally see all of this coming together!