A brand-new Open Dev Kit update is about to be released, bringing some major new functionality and improvements across the editor, rendering pipeline, scripting systems, and workflow tools. Alongside that, we’ve also rolled out significant performance improvements for both the 001 Game Creator and Open Dev Kit online documentations to make browsing, searching, and learning much smoother than before.
Documentation & Website Improvements
Over the past few weeks, we’ve continued refining both the 001 Game Creator and Open Dev Kit web experience, with a strong focus on documentation accessibility, organization, and overall performance.
For 001 Game Creator, the Events and Use Values wiki sections received major backend and structural improvements to significantly improve browsing responsiveness and navigation speed. These pages contain some of the largest and most heavily referenced portions of the documentation, so improving their usability was a major priority. This should make searching through events, use-values, and scripting functionality far smoother, especially for larger development workflows.
Meanwhile, the Open Dev Kit documentation also received a broad wave of optimizations and refinements across the board. Navigation, loading behavior, readability, and overall responsiveness have all been improved, making it easier than ever to explore the rapidly expanding library of Open Dev Kit functionality and tools.
As both engines continue to grow, improving the learning experience and documentation ecosystem remains one of our highest priorities.
Open Dev Kit Public Update
This newest upcoming Open Dev Kit release will deliver one of the biggest collections of workflow and rendering improvements yet.
One of the most significant additions is the ability to convert Lua code back into graphical script nodes, allowing developers to freely move between textual scripting and visual scripting workflows. This opens the door for far more flexible collaboration and experimentation while greatly improving iteration speed for complex systems. Script editing and navigation also received major usability upgrades through new advanced search specifiers, dimming filters for easier node tracking, and improved filtering behavior across API, resource, and script windows.
Rendering and visual fidelity also took a substantial leap forward. The engine now supports SDR/HDR camera controls, bloom effects, camera blurring effects, normal maps, emissive maps, and specular maps across both 2D and 3D assets. New shadow softness and shadow bias options provide more natural lighting results, while projected image lighting allows for highly creative effects such as stained-glass lighting and patterned shadows. We’ve also added support for 3D extruded text, complete with adjustable mesh detail smoothing for cleaner curves and more stylized interfaces.
The editor itself became dramatically more capable thanks to the addition of translation, rotation, and scaling gizmos, new terrain elevation editing tools for heightmaps, expanded tile drawing functionality including line/fill/spray tools, custom tile paint brush workflows, and a brand-new built-in graphics editor. Scene and sprite editing workflows are now substantially faster and more intuitive overall.
On the engine side, Open Dev Kit now includes initial implementations for both an Android editor and Android APK building functionality, laying important groundwork for future mobile development support. We also added support for importing 001 Game Creator tile-set resources, helping strengthen compatibility and workflows between both engines.
AI and advanced systems also continue to evolve rapidly. OpenAI integration now supports streamed responses and request cancellation, while the new MultiArray type introduces powerful multidimensional interpolation systems useful for heightmaps, lookup tables, lattices, gradient maps, and other advanced data structures. Meanwhile, support for Jolt Character and CharacterVirtual controllers greatly simplifies handling ramps, stairs, and character movement for 3D projects.
Rounding out the update are dozens of additional workflow improvements and conveniences, including image-based GUI themes, thumbnail previews for image and sprite parameters, project locking support (including shared projects), improved polymorphism handling through the new Pointer Type function, automatic project loading options, and several new hologram primitives including torus, geosphere, cone, ellipse, and ellipsoid shapes.
Altogether, this update represents another huge leap forward for Open Dev Kit’s usability, flexibility, and technical capabilities.
**Open Dev Kit change-log:**
-fixed not being able to set multiple clipboard formats
-fixed crashes when rendering invalid constructed script nodes
-made Ctrl+A (select all) work inside window, scene, keybinds, and script editors
-added “xhigh” reasoning effort to OpenAI
-fixed incorrectly showing debugger for server reported errors
-implemented conversion from Lua code back to graphical script nodes to allow back and forth editing of scripts between graphical and textual
-added “Pointer Type” function to better support type inheritance and polymorphism
-made it produce Lua even from invalid constructed script nodes
-made it warn when Lua and graphical script conversions fail
-added descriptions to theme editor options
-added AIResult.ResponseRaw property to view unprocessed JSON response to help with debugging
-improved control resizing/redrawing performance
-improved exception error messages by providing exception description if it is available
-improved handling of double-nested variants including in arrays
-added image-based GUI themes (including border, title bar, and menus) by adding countless image properties to all controls and windows
-fixed incorrectly enabling child controls that are disabled when enabling their parent controls
-improved AI theme generation with respect to colors with alpha components
-fixed updating windows fully when switching themes
-reduced flickering of controls when resizing windows
-reduced flickering of native multi-line text boxes when editing its text
-improved auto-sizing of native toolbars
-fixed importing of 001 sprites’ collisions having swapped X/Y sizes
-fixed importing of 001 sprites having offset graphics because of facing options
-added initial implementation of 001 Game Creator tile-set resource importing
-fixed “Invalid imagelist data” error when loading sprites with more than 1024 images
-fixed sprite data indices from getting mismatched after there’s a warning when removing assets and it’s cancelled
-fixed sprite model texture indices from incorrectly pointing to an unrelated image when its image is removed
-implemented new “MultiArray” type which is a multi-dimensional array with floating-point indices, per-dimension step granularity, and interpolation for off-index lookups; useful for lookup tables, lattices, grids, heightmaps, gradient maps, and other spatially-indexed data
-greatly improved performance of all networking functions
-improved graphical script editor searching by only applying it to the listings that are visible, reducing chances of missing something after selecting something that expands
-made graphical script editor list accessors for structures
-improved graphical script editor node summaries for intrinsic operator nodes
-separated graphical script editor node description font/color from comment font/color
-fixed graphical script editor node comment changing causing network performance issues
-implemented line and fill tools for drawing tiles in scene editor (completes the rest of the existing tools such as rectangle/ellipses)
-fixed occasionally losing placed tiles
-made right-click default to grabbing tiles to produce a custom tile paint brush
-added new light properties: shadow softness and shadow bias
-added new camera properties for handling SDR/HDR options and bloom effects
-updated Jolt physics library for latest performance improvements
-fixed occasional crash when DLLs were loaded at the exact same time as other log statements
-added support for normal maps, emissive maps and specular maps to sprites for 2D images/animations and 3D models/animations
-made image and sprite parameters display a thumbnail preview
-added spray tool to scene editor with varying alpha and density options
-added thickness option to scene editor that applies to tile tools: spray (area), line, unfilled shapes (outline), and draw tools
-removed “already connected” when connecting to server and made it connect after closing other connection
-added new “Image” property for light game objects to allow them to project/cookie-cut effects or colored images for creative shadows or stainglass effects
-added support of fundamental Jolt 3D physics Character and CharacterVirtual controllers accessible under physics types to greatly simplify character movement and to handle ramps/stairs properly
-made graphical scripter listings prioritize locals and global user-created API nodes foremost
-implemented script editor node search dimming filter making graphical script editing easier; with “type: flag: return: parent:” search specifiers
-added “type: flag: return: parent: difficulty:” search specifiers to API, classes and graphical script editor windows
-added “type: tag:” search specifiers to instances window
-added “type: folder: tag: linked: autoload:” search specifiers to resources window
-added “type: flag:” search specifiers to graphical script editor’s variable list
-added support for negation (-), quoted values (“…”), and comma-separated OR values to search filters
-made pressing enter multi-select filtered items on search windows: API, classes, instances, resources, script nodes and script variables
-implemented GDI+ render context for GUI plugin (Windows-only)
-made language files mandated to be UTF-8
-implemented initial Android editor (limited)
-implemented initial Android APK app building functionality
-implemented initial built-in graphics editor
-added subtle waving effect of graphical script node tree that begins from the start node
-implemented HTTP Server-Sent Events (SSE) allowing a server to push real-time updates to a client over a long-lived HTTP connection
-added support for getting streamed responses from OpenAI
-added support for cancelling OpenAI requests
-fixed crash when importing models into stand-alone models in resources editor directly (not involving sprites)
-added rotation and scaling pointer tools to scene editor and sprite editor
-added translation/rotation/scaling gizmos when selecting things in scene editor or sprite editor
-made it display main axis labels on 3D editing grid
-implemented terrain elevation raising/lowering (scene heightmaps)
-added ExtrusionDepth property to labels for 3D extruded text via outline-triangulated meshes; added new MeshDetail font parameter to control curve smoothness
-reduced network messages of bulk property changes and various editor actions
-fixed labels so they respect hologram properties and now materials will respond to lights properly while still using top/bottom colors
-made it switch between object mode and tile mode automatically in the scene editor depending on the active tool
-added “Draw 3D Torus”, “Draw 3D Cone”, “Draw 3D Geosphere” render context functions
-added ellipsoid, geosphere, cone, ellipse and torus hologram types
-added “TIL:” (tile counts) to match “CUR:” (world units) on the scene editor bottom display
-fixed errors when selecting an array script node when there is an expected pointer
-implemented project locking and unlocking, including shared projects
-fixed camera resetting location when making changes to the scene’s default camera
-added brightness, chroma, stuation, ARGB and ABGR properties to ColorHDR to match Color
-split GUI control “Border” integer property into a rectangle allowing non-uniform borders
-fixed properties editor label alignment issues due to word-wrapping
-made the lock on the orientation box highlight when hovering over it
-fixed refreshing toolbar when changing icon scale
-optimized out per-element variant wrapping from JSON object arrays
-added smoothing option to GDI/GDI+ render context for scaling of images
-made scene/sprite info panel easier to see
-made scene/sprite info panel include basic navigation controls (can be disabled in user options)
-improved handling of multi-threaded crashes
-improved handling of mismatched arrays in streams
-fixed occasional crashes when deleting text in editable list boxes
-added new camera properties for blurring effects
-added “Auto Load Last Project” user option