Recently, we’ve added a brand-new feature to our editor. Images now get reloaded in real-time, while you’re playing the game in the editor.

If you’re an artist and you’ve spotted a tiling bug with some part of the ground, you don’t have to stop playing (and loose your position) to fix up the error. You just edit the source image, save it, and there it is in-game. This is especially useful when creating animations, since you can see the animation as it is played in its natural environment. It’s also quicker – animating with a live preview is much better than animating in a situation where you have to wait for everything to load before you can see the results of your efforts.

This also has implications if you’re prerendering your art. I’ve been working on a little project for the past few months which uses Blender 3D to render the graphics. In the following video, I demonstrate the results of telling Blender to output its rendered images to the game’s graphics folder. (The change is a bit exaggerated, but it’s to make a point.)

Although there is a bit of a delay in rendering, the time cut off having to start up the game to see the results are very nice. This technique also works with spritesheets, although the script to compile the spritesheet has to wait for all the images to be rendered before compiling the final image.

This is all free, open source software. The Blender file, the game, and the Anura engine can be found over on github. If you’d like to get started using our shiny engine, drop us a note on the forums or talk with us via internet relay chat.

An early beta of Cube Trains is available from http://ddr0.github.com/.