Just gonna go ahead and and drop
a first Asar 1.60 beta release here. Didn't really discuss this with anyone (although I suggested a dicussion after we were done with the v1.60 milestone list), but since it's really just a beta release and not the full thing, I thought it should be okay to just do this without a lot of discussion taking place.
My main reasons for wanting to do a beta release before the actual release this time: v1.60 is full of changes. It probably has the most changes out of any Asar versions so far. Many of them are also quite severe and change a lot of code under the hood. Since I want to make sure we didn't break compatibility of any patches, sprites etc., I thought a beta release would be a good idea (note that there are minor incompatibilities in command line parameters, since I slightly changed their format. Also the DLL isn't binary compatible with older versions, but should still be code-compatible, I think). So we would appreciate it if many people could try out this beta to see if they find any incompatibilities or other problems. Another reason for this beta is that I want to see which executable works for the most people. Some people said they had problems running v1.40 and v1.50 of Asar, which I had built in MSVC, so I wanted to try different builds to figure out which one works for most people. Included are asar-v140.exe, which is built in MSVC2015's default platform toolset, asar-v140_xp.exe, which is built in MSVC2015's compatibility platform toolset (I think this is also what I used for v1.50), and asar-gcc.exe, which was built in MinGW (this should be closest to Alcaro's origional releases). I would love for people to try out all three executables and tell me which ones work for them.
Please note that things between this beta release and the eventual full release of v1.60 can (and likely will) still change. This beta doesn't necessarily contain all features that are going to be in the full v1.60 yet, nor will all features necessarily stay the same. I don't expect changes between this and a full release to be major, though, so if you write code using this version of Asar, it should hopefully just work with the full release as well or, at most, require minor adjustments. Nevertheless, keep this in mind. (It is not recommended to submit resources yet using this beta)
As for changes in this version, I'm not going to recite all of them here since the changelog is gigantic this time around. Instead, I will just link to the new
online changelog, which contains the full list of changes.
Most of the more notable changes should be useful mainly for tools hosted on here. We've added support for include search paths, which should be pretty handy in tools since it should make finding ASM files in specific folders more simple and reliable. I know that I've struggled with this problem with a bunch of tools hosted here. When using them in certain situations or from certain locations, they just stopped working or threw error messages for not finding certain files. Making use of include search paths in those tools, when done right, should make this problem disappear.
We've also added support for standard defines and standard include search paths to Asar. In theory, this should allow creating just a single shared library of code to easily be used across all different tools hosted here by creating a ZIP file with contents that can just be unzipped into the Asar directory. If people decide to make use of this, that should make it possible for all tools to eventually start using the same shared code instead of a new implementation for every different tool.
We also added a better way of handling macro labels (there are now macro sub labels, macro +/- labels etc.), as well as a workaround for those tools that want to include sub routines inside macros, since that caused problems for some people (the labels inside the macros started new sub label groups). Labels can now be declared without starting new sub label groups (although those macros still seem quite hacky to me).
There's way, way more stuff in this new version and I couldn't even possible remember everything of that myself, so if you care about all of the changes, make sure to read the changelog.
Note that the ZIP file doesn't contain the Asar source code anymore and instead just links to GitHub now, where the source code is hosted. That made the most sense to me.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!