ProSonic Still Going

I haven't talked about ProSonic much lately, and certainly I have made fewer posts in my blog lately. I have done only a minimal amount of work on ProSonic in the past week because college is my highest priority right now.

With the release of a new Sonic the Hedgehog 2 beta version, it is up to me to make sure my ProSonic level importing tool (known as "LIMP") is updated to support this newly available version of the game.

I've also only recently been thinking about some ideas to allow game designers to choose how many tiles and blocks they need for each level. So instead of being limited to 256 tiles and 1024 blocks for each level, maybe you need more for a particular level. Perhaps you don't need as many for another level. So I'm thinking of allowing multiple formats of tile and block files. Game designers could choose from 8 up to 2048 tiles, and from 256 up to 65536 blocks. This would allow designers to conserve space, and it would also allow them to have more level material available to them if the current limitations are too strict.

Finally, the PZF format is still being worked on. A programming library is being developed so other people can develop ProSonic tools that may require reading and writing PZF files (e.g. level editors). This library is used inside the ProSonic engine code itself, so it is very flexible and will allow programmers to work with PZF files easily without having to rip anything out of the ProSonic source code.