I've dropped Starcats N as it couldn't keep me fascinated. I'll keep the ship configuration model around for another shooter I have in mind (and have been already working on).

Instead, I've started working on Cornerstone again (at least the underlying platforming engine and editor), and made some enhancements on XRhodes for the next release. They're after the jump.

Follow up:

• modified the XRSF-writing classes' Write() method to return a boolean indicating the success of the operation. They won't assert for the passed SF::Writer's status to be SF::OK, but will return false if it isn't.
• I've subsequently added Write() to AABB and Coord2D.
• modified the XRSF tag system. For each XRSF-compatible class, a member Tags enum contains the available tags and a member static const char* array TAGS defines the actual tag strings.
• added a WorldPosition() function that converts from screen space to world space, based on Camera2D's viewer and layer. There's a variety for this same function that you can configure with any screen scaling that you might be using.

One more thing: I'm thinking of kneading XRTile's functionality into XRhodes. I can already see how the A* implementation will be changing, allowing the flexible use of other pathfinding methods, with/without weighted graphs and heuristics.