There's not really much to say here, as a lot has been said in the forum and on the chat.
Our basic status for 0.99 is:
- New renderer: This is mostly done, some plugins still need porting, and there are a few small issues. There's been several improvements in speed, rendering quality, and a new shader to make text look better until we find a better solution. (On a side note here, we really have been looking, and the more you look, the more you find out that normal Direct-X text rendering is absolutely useless. You can read about it here if you wish).
- Organisation and IDE improvements: The new project bar is complete, as shown below. This now features an organised overview of each application, showing object folders, global variables, sound, music, files, etc, all fully editable from one area. Object folders are implemented both here and in the object bar, to make organising large projects much simpler, and faciliate finding objects you need to find.
Other changes to the IDE include a box for naming and picking a category in the insert object dialog, independent picking of samplers per layer, some crucial fixes which could cause crashes when previewing (probably the cause behind most IDE crashes now), and the fixing of a DLL issue which would stop plugins loading on some computers.
- Still to come: We've yet to really begin the new control system, due to the large amounts of time the above two overhauls have taken. This will support all controllers (including XBox 360 controllers) as well as multiple players and runtime defineable controls.
Another new neat feature which probably won't make 0.99, but will follow shortly after, are custom collision masks, which can be drawn via the picture editor.
In addition, several new plugins are in development, including a tileset plugin, an inventory plugin, and an online plugin.