New engine progress!

Here's the short version: I've been working hard on the new engine for a few years now, and Telepath Tactics is now fully playable within said new engine right up to the first cut scene with Silithis Predat and Ambuur Sang.

Not only does the new engine fix the few remaining issues that I couldn't fix in the original release, it also adds in a ton of improvements and quality of life features! Here is a long but not exhaustive List of Things That Are Better In The New Engine:

• no more inventory-swapping or progressive slowdown bugs.

• you can now save the game mid-battle!

• the camera is way better! It no longer gets zoomed out on large screens; it has smoothing on its movement; and you can now manually zoom the battle camera in and out.

• SO MANY UI IMPROVEMENTS. There's now a visible space selector when you mouse around in battle to show you which space you're over; the game now uses icons for all stats and status effects, each of which you can mouse over for tooltip explanations of what they are; there is now a dedicated shop interface that allows easy browsing and selling off of unwanted items; the old, dizzying "zoom to whichever character is talking" behavior has been replaced with a little pulsing dialogue bubble icon to tell you who's talking; there are now dedicated screens for level-ups, promotions, and browsing through your army; and so much more!

• more sophisticated AI!

• better particle effects!

• a proper lighting system!

• different facial expressions supported for all character portraits!

• victory barks!

• nearly 40 new skills!

• 10 new status effect types!

• new items and support for procedurally generated weapons and armor!

• 1 new basic class type!

• class promotions can now branch! Every class in the new engine now has two unique promotion options, meaning that in addition to its 24 base classes, there are also 48 promoted classes for a whopping 72 character classes total!

• real 3D terrain! Elevation effects no longer distort the map, and when characters are thrown into water or lava, they visibly sink into it instead of just kinda standing on top.

• auto-move-and-attack! (You can shift-click an enemy to have your selected character choose an attack skill and move into attack range all on their own.)

• the old map editor has been expanded into a full-bore campaign editing suite! You'll no longer have to edit XML by hand to create a new campaign--there are tools to handle all of it, including: an improved map editor with an army sub-editor, autotiling (meaning that you can simply paint terrain types onto the battlefield, and the game will do the work of figuring out which specific tiles to use), and procedural terrain generation (letting you create a random map using a hand-picked combination of up to three different tilesets); an in-depth character creator with its own built-in portrait builder and the ability to simply roll up random characters for editing; a dedicated cut scene editor with sub-editors for building custom shops and character rosters; a dialogue tree and script editor with predictive text suggestions and in-engine explanations of reply types and script actions; a skill editor to let you create your own custom attacks; an item editor to let you create your own custom items and equipment; and more!

• more powerful scripting support than ever before, with 194