Dyrt .NET is almost done, and after that Star Story will go through the revision. Now Dyrt became an entirely new game, just featuring the same story. The upgrade for Star Story will be by far less drastic, yet still more drastic than they will look.

The plans:

• I've set up an entirely new engine in C++. It still needs some polish, but it's already quite capable of getting some things done. This new engine already scored frame rates over 1600 FPS, which is far too high, so some slowdowns were required, but at least it gives me the idea the game should run smoothly on slower computers now... At least more than the original game did.

• Screen formats can be more variable. In the original game you only had 800*600 pixels. Fine for its time, but I think a bit more is needed now.

• I liked the completely new interface of Star Story, as it was different from what you were used to see in jRPG, and yet it was still easy to understand. At a few things it was still a bit "clunky" and I hope I can cover that up in this giant update.

• Due to the code under the hood being entirely different, savegames will not be compatible with the new game, but I hope I can write a conversion tool that allows you to convert your savegame data, either completely or partially. No promises yet, but I'll try what I can.

• The original game required a lot of swap files. I hope to get rid of those in this version. Due to the way modern harddrives work, this is the better way to go too.

• Some people will have to help me on this, but if possible I'd like to port this new engine to as many platforms as possible, which may include WASM, or maybe mobile devices, although it may be too big for the latter. To achieve this I'm planning to find some elegant ways to make it possible to omit having to press the right mouse button, since mobile devices don't have one, and with touchscreen this is not easy to emulate.

• The .NET version of Dyrt features 5 extra dungeons which can only be unlocked if you have a Game Jolt account and have made a certain amount of trophies attained on all of my games. I am planning to do the same for Star Story.

• Although I don't want to modify the storyline at all, I am planning to make it possible to move around more freely after doing the first part of the Eugorvnia facility and your arrival on Volcania. Since Star Story was more combat based than other RPGs, I always felt like I made a vital mistake by chaining all these events together like that. Especially since you already had a chain like that before from the start of the game until obtaining the Hawk of the Century. The start game -> Hawk part is something I cannot change without having to modify too much of the story, but the latter should be possible.

• Some people noted that I forgot to give the heroes water based attacks. My plans are to give Xenobi a few water based spells and to give Crystal a Water Gun ARM in order to fix that mistake. It was indeed a pretty dumb mistake.

• I wanna get rid of the launcher, which the original game has. In stead I'll go for a build-in start menu for the game. In my current plans I'd like to see if I can integrate it fully with the start up scroll.

Although it may seem for the eye not much will have changed, this project can still take at least a year (if not more) to set right. Big advantage is that very likely none of the assets have to be replaced, some of them merely have to be converted in order to be used properly. In Dyrt many dungeons had to be redesigned (although a few did remain the same). So I can keep it most of all to the code here, which can speed things up... The code is mostly not what makes the most time... The map design, setting up enemy data and all other database mostly take the cake...

If you wanna see how I'm doing you can see my live reports (although there's a little delay between my posting and the items actually appearing).