Popochiu v2.0.0 - Beta 1

This beta release brings a lot of great things to the plugin, including: the ability to create all the props for a room using the Aseprite Importer, allow characters to scale in the room depending on their position within it, a minor update in the structure of the project, and a huge improvement related to the in-game GUI.

We’ll describe a step by step about how to migrate from previous alpha releases to the beta. And in the future we’ll add a button in the Popochiu dock (or probably the Setup popup) to make this migration easier.

Fixes

• Moved the fix done in Popchiu 1.10.1 for #154 Characters that start with C are not correctly listed in the Characters in room section.
• Exporting the project wasn’t working properly do to a typo in the code.

New features

• :star: Import the content of an entire Room (props) using the Aseprite Importer. You can find the details on how to do it here. Thanks to @StickGrinder for making this amazing feature!
• Characters now have an anti-glide property that can be used to make walking animations to avoid sprite movement between frames. Thanks to @Whyshchuck for working on this.
• :star: PopochiuRegion can now be used to scale characters based on their position inside the region. You can find info about this here. We’ll add the documentation for this in the coming weeks. Thanks again to @Whyshchuck for working in this so-asked feature.
• :star: We have a brand-new documentation site (which looks similar to the official Godot’s documentation) thanks to the huge efforts of @StickGrinder . We’ll keep updating this in the coming weeks, and our goal is to have the full documentation of the plugin, plus “how to” guides and tutorials for the official 2.0 release.
• Talking about documentation, a big part of the classes used by the plugin to make your games work are now documented using inline comments, so you can read those things inside Godot. You can check the already documented classes in this link.
• :star: At last, we can present the GUI templates (along with a refactoring of the graphical interface structure in the project) and a new tab in the Popochiu dock dedicated to the game UI. Detailed documentation will come soon, but for now, you can change the look and the behavior of your game GUI to one of these templates:
  • 2-click Context-sensitive: Is the one that Popochiu has been using since its creation. You can trigger events with the left or the right click (or even the middle click).
  • 9 Verbs: Now you can create a game with the GUI of the early graphic adventure games made by LucasArts. Interactions will depend on the selected verb, the inventory will always be visible, and in the settings popup you will be able to save and load the game, change the audio volume, or alter the behavior of the texts that display information about the object under the cursor (also known as hover text).
  • Sierra: This one will make your game look like the classic Sierra games. Cycle through interaction commands with the right click (or use the buttons in the top bar), use a dedicated popup for the inventory, and use the settings popup to do the same you can do in the 9 Verbs settings popup, plus changing the way dialogs are presented (Above each character, in Portrait mode, or like Caption), and if the texts continue automatically or with a click.
  • Custom: Build the GUI of your game from scratch if you prefer. Documentation on how to use the components provided by Popochiu (or how to create your own) will be released in the coming weeks.
  • Lastly, in the UI tab, you’ll see the components and popups being used by the game GUI. In future releases we will add more functionality to this tab. For now, its main benefit is to allow you to create a popup or add components (specially useful when working with the Custom template). Clicking this tab will open the in-game GUI scene: graphic_interface.tscn.

[ :exclamation: ] Important to read if you are using any alpha [ :exclamation: ]

If you already have a working project in Popochiu 2 - Alpha X, follow these steps in order to make it work in Beta 1 (thanks to @Whyshchuck for noticing this and for making us realize the importance of publishing this mini-guide):

1. Delete the popochiu folder inside addons and paste the folder of the updated version.
2. Here we will explain how to do it with Visual Studio Code on Windows, but you can use any text editor that allows you to replace a text string in all files (regardless of their extensions) within a folder:
   1. Open Visual Studio Code and load the folder containing the project: File > Open Folder… or Ctrl+K Ctrl+O.
   2. Replace the text string res://popochiu in all files with res://game. To do this, you can use Edit > Replace in Files or Ctrl+Shift+H. In the Search field, enter res://popochiu, and in the Replace field, enter res://game. Replace all occurrences with the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Enter or by clicking the button that appears more to the right of the text field where you entered res://game (the button has a small arrow).
   3. Confirm the action when prompted by the application.
3. Open the project in Godot, and when it has finished loading, restart the engine. Once the project reopens, you should not see any errors in the Output.
4. Click on the Setup button at the bottom of the Popochiu dock, and in the popup that opens, choose one of the available templates. The one Popochiu had been using until now is the 2-click Context-sensitive.
5. Popochiu will copy the necessary files for the selected template. Once it’s done, you can continue working on your project.
6. If you run the game, you should see the game’s GUI with the template you selected.