So like, the "Chocolate" project hasn't really ever been in serious serious development, and it's been like over half a year since we talked about the spritesheet stuff (or the project itself), it was always more of a list of ideas and something we wanted to do, but other things took our attention and it never got underway.
But basically what it was: "Chocolate Cave Story" is a play-on-words to "Vanilla Cave Story", and was basically to be an alternate starting point when creating a mod. It wasn't an actual mod meant to be played, but rather just Cave Story but with tools and hacks put into it designed to remove some limits of modding.
Some examples of stuff we wanted to do:
- Increase the limits of the game engine. A higher NPC and Bullet limit. Bigger TSC space, etc. [This is the only thing that was actually done. We have an .exe that raises these limits (moves the RAM tables to a new segment) and nothing else]
- Some of the most widespread and useful patches all pre-applied, but patched in a way that follows with 2 very specific criteria:
1. It doesn't impede or replace vanilla, so nothing is lost by switching to chocolate.
2. Everything is compatible. Whether it be Clownacy's Modloader/TSC+/Equip+/InfiniteMimigaMask/Phy/N.I.C.E./BKG hack/if the transparency or directdraw stuff ever see the finish line/UniversalWeaponFunction/Whatever, chocolate would be an exe where everything was put together without conflicts
- Some useful stuff that works better as an exe rather than a series of patches, which is where one of the main things we wanted to do: Have all the entities on a single spreadsheet (or spread out but loaded at all times). We know HOW to do this, it would basically be writing a catch-all rendering function, and then replacing all the framerect data in all 360 entities (+Map Bosses) to use it, would be timely to fit it all on the sheets and test that it all renders correctly, but it would only have to be done once and then we have the .exe and .bmp to allow universal NPC usage.
- Looking at the oldass todo list I also see More Tile Types: (Water No Npc, Background Slopes, Foreground/Drawn currents, Spike Slopes (i.e. sloped lava)) was suggested.
- Modify BL to have the option to detect and allow all this.
So yeah, that's what we talked about 8ish months ago. Just sticking unobtrusive and optional stuff all into an exe without compatibility issues. We started a .bmp with all of the NPC sheets on it but then nobody wanted to work on it at the time and we forgot about it eventually. whoops.