v0.7.0-beta

I'm going to be up front: I wasn't able to get asset bundles into this release. It will be a really cool feature when it finally is implemented and trust me when I say I did all I could to try and get it in this release, but there's just too much other stuff I want you all to be able to play with for me to hold back this release any longer. Plus, my life is going to get a lot busier for awhile, and I still don't know when I'll be able to work on asset bundles, let alone finish them.

Anyways, there's lots of cool stuff to check out here. The thing you should notice first is the welcome screen, which will populate itself with your most recently opened projects - with thumbnails and everything! Once inside the interface has seen lots of minor improvements that should just make it easier to use. Most of all the changes should be readily apparent and intuitive, but there's some things I haven't come up with a good way of making immediately apparent to the user, like right clicking an asset in the asset library to access its settings, or that you can do stuff like move assets around in the puppet editor by using the arrow keys. There are a lot of new features and I'm kinda too lazy to make a full feature list, but I suppose if your really interested you could look at all the commits since the last release here. Otherwise, I'd also like to suggest you go through the menu buttons (particularyl "view"), there's some neat stuff in those.

Some of the biggest changes made were all about how assets are stored and referenced. Because of these changes there are some new cool things like being able to update assets, sync these changes, and making sure no one is able to do things like delete or replace an asset made by someone else, and syncing assets between clients should be much more smooth and stable than previously.

I hope you enjoy this release, and know that feedback is always welcome and appreciated, even if I won't be able to work on this project actively for a bit. Windows will want the windows build, mac users the darwin build (will be uploaded in a couple of days, can't build it on my laptop), and linux the linux build. For all of those, you probably want the "x64" version, if there are any errors about the architecture or not being able to run the program, try one of the others.

Now, a little about the future. Part of what I'll be busy with over the next few months is actually related to babble buds, or rather the puppet rendering engine I made that it uses. I'll be potentially making a game using babble buds for the cutscenes, similar to tower offense (mentioned here a few posts back), but for a larger game with a larger team over a longer period of time. And, its in unity, using c# instead of javascript. So, I've already made a basic port of babble.js (the engine) to c#, which I'm calling babble.cs, and if anyone is interested in using babble puppets in a unity project, you can check it out here. Please note its not really ready for production yet, as it is still being worked on, but at the same time if you need it now, then it is plenty usable, and the provided demo project should make it clear how to use it. Additionally, I'll be working on a piece of software to help write cutscenes for the babble puppets, as up til now its been tedious manual labor. It'll be called "babble movie maker" and probably won't be ready for general use for a substantially long amount of time, but it's in the works. And of course, eventually there'll be a 1.0 release of babble buds itself, with all sorts of cool things like asset bundles (urgh!), being able to browse community made puppets from within the program, and some features to make connecting to other users much easier, since its currently a hassle still. Once again I hope you enjoy this current release, and rest assured there's still a lot more down the pipeline, but it'll be awhile since I'm just one guy, and I've got a lot on my plate. Thanks!