i don't know how much i am allowed to say but the project is slightly active, its far from vaporware in the sense that it does exactly what it said it would when it first came out,you can build a single player game with a high degree of customization and speed.
the ally system has been 'in the works' since the summer of '97, the best solution the very best solution, if you absolutely have to have multiple entities controlled by the player on screen all at one time, would be to build your own game, i myself will only twist coldstone's arm so far, but you want multiple collisions, and while wned loops or just loops in general, and actual text/font control then its not here. Again, try (url="http://"http://www.tntbasic.com")TNT(/url),the time you'd devote to coming up with a modular game engine built to your specs would be well spent.
and i've come up with a d'uh solution for the player portrait, create your interface with as many slots/frames as you need for the player.Then create the portraits you want save them all as one big strip,either png or pict(mask out the area to be transparent), go to the layout editor resize the portrait box, to the appropriate size/position.
This is by no means a pure solution, because you cannot mix&match; on the fly, you have to think out the combinations before hand(this should be no problem assuming your game has a plot)
random general note: if you have photoshop or just a multi layered image editor this would be easier, if not, you can always test your layouts using a browser&html; document, i suggest (url="http://"http://www.icab.de")iCab(/url) because it properly renders the colors/transparency of PNG graphics.
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(url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html")eLL' softWare: updated 10.08.02(/url)