After roughly three and a half years of development, I think I've finally built myself into a corner. I find that the game file takes several minutes to load and save in MMF2, and all of the old events that I created when I was less experienced are starting to pile up on me. It's like opening a cupboard in your house that you haven't used in ages only to find that it's been taken over by bugs.
Does this mean that the project will be canned? NEVERRRR! However, an engine revamp is looking more appealing to me by the day. I'm strongly considering remaking the game from scratch, but reusing all of the assets I've created to speed things up (i.e. the dungeon layouts, graphics, sprites, etc.)
To put it in perspective, here are some of the benefits that I would reap from remaking the game engine:
- All of the bugs that have been plaguing me will be completely gone, and any new bugs that crop up with the new engine will be far easier to fix.
- Now that I know how to use functions effectively, I can cut down the number of events by a huge amount. For example, every line of dialog currently takes up its own event, but if I can condense all dialog use into a single function, this can easily chop off 1500-2000 events. Not to mention, it would make it far easier for me to edit dialog later.
- Instead of hard-coding all of the dialog into the game, I can extract it from an external file to make it easier to modify. This would also allow me to translate the game into other languages if necessary.
- Instead of using the illusion of 3D space, I could give the game world a true height map so that the player can actually jump over certain obstacles. This would cut down on invisible barriers, and it would also allow me to get more creative with the combat system (i.e. certain attacks tossing monsters into the air).
- I can divide different regions of the game world into sub-applications to reduce loading times.
- Now that I've fleshed out a decent part of the story and the game world, I can go back and make changes to the plot more easily.
- I can increase the frame rate from 50 to 60 without having to adjust all of the timing-related events to compensate.
This is only a thought right now, but when/if I decide to remake the engine, I will be releasing the old version of the game to the public, which contains roughly 33% of all of the planned content for you guys to mess around with. 
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Strife 
? GO FOR IT !
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The main challenge is going to be through programming, though I would like to touch up some of the monsters and NPCs too.
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