I'm happy to announce that we now have a new GitHub sponsor, Ethan Shaughnessy, so I wanted to take a moment to thank him for helping support the open-source project.
If you can donate just $1 a month, it would be a big help and your name will be added to the game's credits. I've been talking with @Castpixel, who designed all of Pixel Vision OS, and I'd like to hire her to start making new art packs for everyone to use in their games.
Finally, on the topic of helping out on GitHub, it would be great if everyone could follow the project. I understand sponsoring may be hard for people right now, but if everyone on the mailing list favorited and watched the project, we'd quickly become one of the most popular open-source game engines on GitHub.
All you need to do is click these two buttons on the main repo page:
Outside of that, progress has been slower than I had hoped. I am probably another week away from finishing the new Draw Tool, which combines the Color and Sprite tools into one. I spent a lot of time reworking the sprite size selection button so you can have 8x8, 8x16 (which was a special mode on the NES), 16x8, 16x16, and 32x32.
This took some extensive rewriting of the canvas and sprite picker logic. But now that it works, I'm debating if I want to redo the sprite drawing API to make it easier to work with these new sizes. Currently, you have to use DrawSpriteBlock() and manually define the width and height. It would be nice if you could set a sprite size and it automatically did this for you. Unfortunately, there are many edge cases I need to think through.
That said, the chances of releasing v9.8 by the end of the month are not looking good. I was hoping to be further along by now. I still have a backlog of bugs to work through yet. The silver lining is that v9.7+ is stable and more people are using it to make games. So I feel less concerned with replacing it so I can focus on making sure the next release is more stable, backward compatible, and fixes as many bugs as possible.
As always, you can download and build a version of v9.8 from GitHub. This will give you a sense of all of the changes I've made. Just be warned running PV8 from a dev branch may have issues I'm still working through. I do my best only to push stable code, but that branch is still a work in progress.
I hope I have some better news for you next week. I'll continue to work through all of these open issues and get v9.8 ready for release as soon as possible!