Time for an update to show how I'm getting on. A lot of what I've been doing is copy-pasting and reworking code from the old version of the game, so I'm progressing more rapidly than would otherwise be the case.

Some of the things I've added:

Hills

Now instead of just random test heights the landscape is made up of distinct hills, which raise the surface from their centre. I've had to compromise a bit with the heights available (bottom of the lakes to top of the hills) because it affects a lot of aspects of the scrolling renderer and I don't want to go above hardware limits for the render target size.

Water

Just using my old dodgy shader from the old version, I'm currently just drawing a big quad at the water surface level. This may be changed to a rough polygonal shape around the lakes, to save on fillrate. It has to read the custom depth buffer so must be moderately expensive even when there is no drawing taking place.

Particles

I've added a very simple particle system, for things like fire, blood, splashes etc. You can place particle systems on the map and it will intelligently turn them on / off as needed as you move around. It is currently using point sprites, so the particles are flicking out of view as the point centre moves off the screen. This may not happen on the OpenGL ES version, I haven't tried it yet, but if it is still a problem I'll either switch to quads or try a workaround (I did read a suggestion of changing the viewport and using glScissor). I'm also considering using something similar for things like butterflies.

Animation

Minor tweak, I use the distance travelled to determine how far to advance the animation, instead of just time, so the footsteps are a better match to the ground instead of sliding so much.

Jumping

Added support for altitude and gravity. This is mainly used for the player but will also be used for flying creatures. The bats are not yet implemented, they are at a fixed height for now. However it works with the collision detection, so e.g. bats can fly over animals and plants, and the player can jump over low obstacles. :D

Scripting

The very basics of the LUA scripting is working again. I need to do more work for attaching it to characters, when I deal with level loading. You can use the scripting to drive subtitles for the game and speech bubbles on characters, play sounds, animations, move characters etc. :ph34r:

Sound

Finally I've got the sound working again. This was initially mostly a copy-paste affair, but I added support for looping sounds, for ambience around the maps, like insect noises, water rippling, fire etc. I also improved it to use a basic positional audio, where each sound has a location, and the listener has a location, and it smoothly interpolates the sounds in stereo as they move about relative to the listener. There is also reverb / echo and dynamic compression. I haven't tried the music tracker yet but I intend to change this considerably.

As usual any suggestions / comments are most welcome. :)