Thanks for your patience, it has taken longer than I originally planned, but GB Studio 4.2.0 is finally ready for beta testing.

You can download the beta right now at https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/releases/tag/v4.2.0-beta1

This release is mainly aimed at plugin authors, giving them a chance to test existing plugins, make any required updates, and maybe even submit them to the new plugin repository (more on that later!). While major changes aren’t expected before the final release, this is still a beta, so please remember to back up your projects before trying it.

There’s lots to cover in this version, too much to write here but here’s some of the highlights:

Improved scene types

The Platformer scene type now includes most features previously provided by hauntology's Platformer Plus plugin. That includes dashing, double jumps, coyote time, wall jumps, solid actors and more. All these features can be toggled on or off as needed, and disabled features have no performance impact. If your current project heavily depends on Platformer Plus, migration not be easy, it might be best to stick with older GB Studio versions until you start your next project.

The Adventure scene type now also supports solid actors as well as rounded corner collision tiles to make it easier to walk into tight spaces.

The Shoot ‘Em Up game type now includes more configurable options such as Free Movement so you’re no longer locked to one screen edge.

You can also now toggle individual scene types on or off per project. For example, if you’re making a platformer, you can set Platformer as the default for new scenes and hide other scene types so their settings and events don’t even appear.

Plugin System

There is now an inbuilt plugin manager allowing quickly finding, installing and updating from an approved list of plugins. 

If you are a plugin author who wants to add your plugin to the official repository you can submit a PR to https://github.com/gb-studio-dev/gb-studio-plugins

And More

• Support for per project constant values
• Sprite editor quality of life improvements
• Linux ARM (Raspberry Pi) support
• Camera backtracking and bounds control
• Per scene 8x8px sprite tile mode support
• Extract color palettes from background images
• Rate limit event to handle things like only being able to fire X times per second
• Automatic tile flipping in Color Only scenes to reduce ROM usage.
• “Run From Here” scene preview, by right clicking on a scene. Allows only including selected scenes for faster build times.
• Per scene color mode override allowing a game to have Color Only sections
• Lots of bug fixes!

The full list of changes can be found here https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md#unreleased

As always if you spot any problems, please make sure to report an issue at https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio/issues

Thanks to everyone who contributed to help build this version and an especially big thanks to all the subscribers on Patreon who helped make this release possible.

Hope you all enjoy the holiday season! I’m aiming for this to be the official release here on Itch.io early in the New Year, I just need to write the documentation now!!

Thanks,

Chris