Chevy Ray Johnston recently revealed some information about the upcoming version 0.8 for FlashPunk. This will be coming with a whole host of improvements, only a few weeks after the first public version was released.

Here are the most prominent features of the new version, as described by Chevy Ray:

• TileMap class improved to allow for way, way larger TileMaps, added a loadFromArray function, and they have collision functions also.
• Improved collision speeds, pixel-perfect collisions now faster and also will collide properly with Grids and TileMaps.
• Camera is now a class of its own, not just a Point, and has a few functions. I plan on giving it customizable following behaviour, etc. as well. Thinking more on this first though.
• Default FlashPunk preloader.
• Exposing Entities’ collision rectangle and mask properties, so you can manipulate them yourself without using setCollisionRectangle().
• Regular text support for system and embedded TTF fonts.

A new feature of great interest to me that Chevy Ray hinted at including is a native function to rotate the view angle of the screen. This should have the same kind of functionality as the view_angle function in Game Maker.

With the amount of changes to the library, the new version is unlikely to be very compatible with version 0.74, however, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make the modifications required. No date has been set for the release of the new version but with Chevy Ray seemingly working very hard it shouldn’t be too long.

If you wish to suggest more features, you can post here.