Version 5 is not ready to be released yet, but I wanted to talk about the the features it now supports. When I released version 2, I got a lot of feedback talking about data saving, such as your macro lists being recognized, adding aliases to achievements in the creator, and of course level playback. Well, all of those things have already been put into version 5 with exception to aliases for achievements; I will describe each feature below.
The program now reads the macros.txt file to get the list of your macros. You can access your list of macros in the program now. If you press enter on a macro, it inserts it into the file. If you press space on a macro, it copies that macro to a string variable. When pressing q, it will paste that macro you pressed space on, so it writes the actual macro instead of just the word.
There is an alias list, it isn't very useful on its own, so it is in a menu of other lists. Currently you can not use it for achievements, because I haven't worked on adding that yet. May be harder than it sounds.
I have added a section creator. Make a time selection using the shift keys to locate the distance of 2 points, then press s. Select either play lines, press lines, or macro lines. Then type in the number of times you would like to paste the line. Each time it pastes the line, they are separated by the selection time. Like if selection is 1000, it will paste 1000, 2000, 3000.
And finally, level playback. If you play back your level in rhythm rage debug mode, it just plays through the level. You can not pause, rewind, or fast forward. And I don't think it will play back the level unless you start from the beginning, or before the first action. Let me explain.
What my creator does is looks for the first action. Once it is played, it looks for the second action. And so on. I believe rhythm rage does the same thing. So if you just wanted to play back the level in my creator from before the first action then it will work. However, unlike rhythm rage, you can pause, rewind, and fast forward. And once a sound is played, it looks for the next one. So if you wanted to replay the level while going backwards, it will not play the sounds. So I have achieved level playback the same way rhythm rage has, however, if you try using the features that my creator has that rhythm rage doesn't, you will think the playback feature is horrible, when in reality, it isn't. So keep that in mind.
I am going to try to get around this and make it to where every time you press an arrow it checks the time versus the time it wants to look for a sound and see if it works, however don't count on it. The feature works, but it is not made for advanced features yet, so don't think it sucks. However there is one drawback to my playback method, it does not recognize macros. It will play the macro line sound instead of the actual macro. So to ensure your macros have the right sounds and number of actions, use rhythm rage to verify.
Let's talk about version 6. Version 5 is all about data saving. You can finally get everything done inside the program, and know all of your data with all your files. So is that the end? No. Version 6 is going to focus on customization and integration.
Right now it plays default sounds for actions, and only one sound per action. Version 6 will fix that.
And for integration, I want people to be able to paste the creator into their pack folder and be able to use it. So when you select sounds to play, you can select from your sounds in the folder. I also want to make it to where you can choose from the list of current levels you have and not have to rename it generated.lvl. And when you choose which level to load, it will load the aliases and macros and everything else for that level as well.
This is way beyond what I am doing right now, but there is some clarity of what this creator is becoming. Version 5 is finally adding all of the data support features people requested back in version 2, and version 6 will hopefully go as planned and add customization and integration to make it feel more convenient to use.