In the past DarkXL and DaggerXL releases, both games had custom “XL” title screens. These served multiple purposes: a place to display the version number – a very useful piece of information to know for a variety of reasons, a place for extra XL specific options such as Mods and multiplayer setup and as a nice extra element of polish.
However as of the next release you’ll need to launch the games using the Launcher, which could already be done in the previous build as well. The Launcher is where you’ll be able to see the version number and can setup Mods or other XL specific features. To that end I think the XL specific title screens have served their purpose but are no longer needed. Starting from the next build when a game is launched the game menus will be displayed immediately, just like in the vanilla versions.
There are several reasons for this change, other then simply not needing the title screens any longer:
* Adding new games no longer requires new custom art work.
* Later I plan on adding the ability to switch between games without shutting down the XL Engine.
* Once you start a game, focus is entirely on the game itself and not on the XL Engine, unless XL Engine specific features are used such as the console or XL Engine settings menus.
* A unified XL Engine interface is presented, no longer being game-specific.
In addition to the Title Screen change, there will also be a change to the way versioning is done. Instead of having a version per game, there will be a global XL Engine version. Whenever the support for a given game is improved the global version will be modified as well. Of course how complete support is for a given game will still be tracked but only one version number needs to be used for bug or feature tracking.
