WME 1.7 is out of beta and official. Both the forum and WME
website have a new look, too. Also, WME no longer requires a commercial license for commercial games. It is now donationware:
Quote:
WME 1.7 (January 21st, 2007)
* Stencil shadow support for 3D characters.
o Stencil shadows are projected onto hidden scene geometry. For that reason, more detailed geometry is necessary. It is now possible to include meshes only for the shadow casting purposes in the geometry 3DS file. See the "3D Characters -> Principles and requirements" chapter in the docs for updated hidden geometry discussion.
o 3D actors can now reference a separate low-poly model for stencil shadow generation purposes (see the "3D actor definition file" in the docs).
o It's possible to set shadow detail level on scene-per-scene base directly in SceneEdit (you can only enable stencil shadows in some scenes if you need to).
o New attributes and methods: Game.MaxShadowType, Game.IsShadowTypeSupported(), Scene.MaxShadowType, Actor3D.ShadowType.
o There is a new chapter called "Shadows" in the docs which describes all the supported shadow types, and their pros and cons.
* Debugging console. The console allows the developer to inspect running scripts and the values of script variables at runtime. It also allows setting breakpoints to pause game flow at specified script lines. See the "Debugging console" chapter in the documentation for more details.
* String Table Manager. A new tool for extracting game texts and managing the string table for localization purposes. See the "String Table Manager" chapter in the documentation for more details.
* Note: Both Debugging console and String Table Manager require Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed. It can be downloaded here.
* Changed the behavior of scene scrolling for 2.5D scenes. WME now assumes the camera overviews the entire scene (previous versions assumed camera only overviewed the top-left part of the scene). The original behavior can be restored by checking the "Scene scrolling pre-1.7" checkbox in SceneEdit.
* X models now support the "AnimTicksPerSecond" attribute exported by some 3D packages.
* Added right-to-left reading order support for the game settings dialog (see the "Localization support" chapter in the docs).
* Upgraded to the latest version of Theora decoder, which now uses MMX instructions to improve performance.
* New scripting methods and attributes:
o Game.TalkSkipButton - specifies which mouse button can be used to skip talk lines (left, right, both, none).
o Game.ClearResponses() - clears any responses previously added by Game.AddResponse().
o Game.ChangingScene - specifies whether a scene change is currently in progress.
o Game.LockMouseRect() - locks mouse pointer movement to a specified rectangle on screen.
o Actor3D.AnimTransitionTime - default time for smooth animation transitions.
o Actor3D.GoToTolerance - to prevent actors from moving by just one pixel.
o Emitter.MaxBatches - maximum number of particle batches generated by the particle emitter.
o Emitter.EmitEvent - allows the particle emitter to trigger a script event whenever a new batch of particles is generated.
o Button.TextAlign - omitted in previous versions.
o Actor3D.MergeAnims() - to load 3D character animations from X file at runtime.
o Actor3D.UnloadAnim() - to release animations from memory.
o New global function Debug() which pauses game execution and invokes the debugging console.
* Spacebar in SceneEdit toggles visibility of a selected node (useful for fine-tuning overlay placement with keyboard).
* ProjectMan doesn't show hidden files by default (can be re-enabled in ProjectMan settings).
* In windowed mode, WME now remembers and restores the previous window position.
* Low-res shadow model can now be used for flat and stencil shadows to improve performance.
* When placing a 3D actor in SceneEdit, you can select which animation is played by the actor (Actor -> Choose animation).
* New license. WME is now distributed as donationware. No separate commercial license is required.
* New WME logo (thanks to Malasieno), new WME website design (thanks to odnorf).
* FIX: Bounding box for 3D characters was only growing and it was never restored to its original size.
* FIX: Animation events for 3D characters are no longer skipped on low framerates.
* FIX: Camera roll value is now properly read from 3DS files generated by 3D Studio Max.
* FIX: Memory leak in Actor3D.SetTexture().
* FIX: Game.HideLoadingIcon() was causing script stack corruption.
* FIX: Alpha values lower then 8 are no longer ignored.
* FIX: Alpha blending modes were causing graphical artifacts on 3D actors.
* FIX: Passing 'float' values from plugins didn't work.
