I think it's important to say what we're doing and what's happening every so often, so monthly updates seem like a good way to do this.
October and November were very busy months, with all three of us doing a lot of work, exam preparation and moving houses (again). So now that's out the way, we're working hard on possibly the biggest incremental update in the history of Construct.
0.98 may well be the last major build version before a release candidate, and we're hoping to close over 50 tracker bugs on the way to releasing it (about 20 down so far). Stability aside, we're looking to put in several behind the scenes changes which are sorely needed. These include a completely rewritten event sheet editor, for the following reasons:
- the code base is ridiculously messy and very hard for us to work on
- there's alot of usability problems and weird bugs which aren't easily correctable
- it's kind of hard to implement new features as it is that we really want to
- a rewrite will allow us to use direct-x for the rendering, meaning vsync'd scrolling and zooming
In addition to this, there's lots of refactoring going on with old code to create a most consistent code base. This won't be completed prior to 1.0, but it'll make things more bearable, and ultimately, help with the rewriting we'll be doing post 1.0.
Other things that'll be included in 0.98 (hopefully) include a completed version of XAudio, full online capabilities, and a new bone movement behavior (which will allow for fluid creation of multi-segmented characters, including animating them).
We realise that 0.98 will probably take a fair bit of time, due to the scope of what we're going to accomplish. However, it'll be well worth the wait and bring us much closer to completion.