- Can I use Flare and its art to create a commercial game?

The art and code portions will continue to be free/libre so anyone can share them. If you distribute your fully-original campaign data as a stand-alone mod, just that data can probably remain proprietary. You can sell all of it commercially (though people are free to share the core art/code portions, and any specific derivative works).

- Does/Will it support localization, dialogs, effects like poison, fire damage or area effects.

It supports localization, dialogs, and some kinds of spell effects. Version 0.18 will expand upon the variety of effects.

- Will/can I give custom attributes to the characters?

The four main attributes (Physical, Magical, Offense, Defense) are somewhat set in stone. You can rename them and tweak the size of the bonuses they give. For completely changing the attribute system (let's say, changing to D&D style or GURPS style attributes) you'd need to dig into the code and create a fork.

Maybe in the distant future we'll make these customizable, but it would probably require converting the entire engine to use a scripting language.

- Do you plan to provide any tool sets like graphical editors etc?

The Tiled Map Editor is used to make maps. Besides that, everything else is editing plain text files (or creating art). I don't plan on providing graphical editors.

- Will the games run under Windows, Mac and Linux? Perhaps on mobile devices, too?

Windows, Mac, Linux. It can be ported to mobile devices that have SDL support. Note that the GPL may be incompatible with some app store terms.

- One more thing: I noticed that there is quite a long loading time when moving into another area. Will this speed up in the next versions of Flare?

Load time varies by system (on the largest maps, my laptop loads in about 3 seconds; my desktop loads in about 0.25 seconds). There are some optimizations we can do that should help in the future.

Used here http://opengameart.org/content/teleporter-circle Thanks!

First, have a look at the sprite sheets used by Flare: mods/fantasycore/images/enemies/*.png

Notice a few things:

• Always 8 rows, one per facing direction
• Starts with facing "left" and continues clockwise
• Animation frame sets are together in columns

Next, look at how the animations are defined: mods/fantasycore/animations/*.txt 

• The basic size per frame and drawing offset (from the center of the creature's feet to the top left corner of the frame)
• A short list of animations. The names in brackets are important and must match what the engine expects (not all animations are required; if you put something unexpected in the brackets it will be ignored)
• Position is the starting column (base 0).
• Frames is the number of frames for this animation (to the right of the starting column).
• Duration is how long each frame displays in milliseconds (best to use multiples of 33 really)
• Type allows some animations to loop or play back and forth.

In the enemy definition files, the art and animations are referenced: mods/fantasycore/enemies/*.txt 

• gfx_prefix= refers to the sprite sheet .png file
• animations= refers to the animation .txt file

So you'll need to create the sprite sheet and the animation file. The animation file is just a lot of manual work -- probably best to take an existing file and edit it. The sprite sheet, you'll have to create by combining the individual frames into one large image. Perhaps you can use a tool like ImageMagick's "montage" to help.

OK we'll try a couple more things.

First, make sure the flare folder was extracted, and that all of this isn't happening inside a zip file.

After that, try running flare directly from command line. Start, run, cmd.exe. Then navigate to the extacted flare folder using the cd command. Once you are in the flare folder, run the dir command to make sure flare.exe and SDL.dll are there. If so, type flare and hit enter.