New Simple Release and network-enabled Super Melee Prototype

It's been a long, long time coming but we're finally releasing new tools and content for our extremely patient and supportive public. If you've never dived into our in-development development tool, Simple, or tried to check out and run our Super Melee prototype, now is a great time to give it a test if you're willing to walk through some rickety, rocky stuff. Our hope is that, with this release, some people will have success being able to play networked Super Melee together. We still have oodles of work to do, and our documentation leaves a lot to be desired, but we hope with the help of our community, we'll be able to get some people off the ground.

The most exciting part of this release for the layperson may access to our repaired networking functionality. We had it working internally for a long time but had a lot of challenges actually getting everything out the door for all of you. About a week ago, we did a live test on Friday's stream with a community member who successfully hopped into melee with Dan, playing some Melee all the way from San Francisco to New Zealand!

The short and sweet guide to getting up and running on your Windows device is:

• Grab Simple from https://pistolshrimp.itch.io/simple and extract it somewhere.
• Run the included content_installer.exe in the install/ directory.
• Open simple.exe , load the melee sim, and press play!

Below is a video of Dan walking through the steps, and you can also see more in-depth, but likely out-of-date and still incomplete, documentation on GitHub.

Does it work? Did you have any problems? We want to know! Please join us on Discord in the #simple channel and let us know!

Watch our live streams on Twitch to see Dan using Simple in the creation of UQM2 and learn how to use it, yourself!

Tool Release Notes

For the detail oriented or those already familiar with Simple, here are the release notes for the latest Simple build:

• Breaking Changes:
  • viewer data changed from ini/rawtext to json. See example content (https://github.com/pistolshrimpgames/simple-content) for usage.
  • tool ini config now stored in User/ subdirectory within install. To preserve your simple.ini file, move it into User/ before running simple.exe.
• viewer
  • Better GUI support (on-screen, dialogs) via CEGUI
  • Initial logging support (viewer.log)
  • Data now in JSON
  • Basic "off-screen" indicators and mini-map support for melee
• simple
  • Continuous collision detection for physics.
  • Wrapping collision detection for physics.
  • UI: Terser display of lines of script, using icons rather than words in some places.
  • UI: Ctrl+H toggle display of unchanged inherited properties.
  • UI: Find in script.
  • UI: Enumeration and bit-flag support.
  • UI: Save/Load of running game in simple.
  • UI: 'Conjure' support in complex property initialization.
  • UI: Breakpoint support in complex property initialization.
  • UI: Backdrop color setting for script view window.
  • UI: CSV file support to consume definition batches (presumably from a spreadsheet).