Fable Maker 0.5.0 - Goodbye CSV hello JSON

Hello Fablers!

The important news:

This is kind of an important update, I tried to finish this update as fast as possible because it changes major parts of the underlying story engine. All previous stories will not be compatible with this new update, if you try to load old save files, the program will most likely crash. You should be able to delete old saves through the main menu without a problem though. I am very sorry to anyone who may have written a large story in Fable Maker already. But on the bright side, this change is a very good one that makes the save files easier to read, allowed me to change some backend code to make it easier for me to add new features and this update should allow all future updates to be backwards compatible! Which means that if you write a story now, it will still be compatible with future Fable Maker versions even if they add new features.

If you want to know the nitty gritty, Fable Maker stories used to be saved in a CSV (comma seperated value) format. This worked fairly well and made file sizes really small. But the downside was that the file was not readable at all if you just opened up the text file in any text editor. It also made it a bit difficult to add or change features due to how the save/ load system was set up. In 0.5.0 I've overhauled the entire save/load system to use JSON files. JSON has a lot of benifits including being human readable within a text editor for those who may want to write stories that way (I don't know who would want that, but the option is now there). It allows me to change and add features more easily because parameters within the save file have proper variable names compared to number coordinates previously. JSON also allows me to make the engine backwards compatible because the JSON format allows me to check if variables exist or not and process them appropriately.

Sound FX are changing:

A more minor change, but still important. Sound FX's are changing in 0.5.0. You will now be able to look at available sounds through an audio manager which is similar to the image manager. This feature is not fully implemented yet, so you can only choose premade sounds right now. But in the next update I hope to add the ability to add usermade sounds. Within the audio manager, you can also preview sounds so you don't have to wildly guess what premade sounds sound like! The sound FX feature may be a bit buggy at the moment, so I would recommend holding off using it right now until the next update as I'll crush all the bugs and add usermade sound effects as well. Some other functionalities to do with sound and music will be added in the next update. Stay tuned!

That's all for today,

CDcruz