I figured out how to animate my characters with a background that isn’t just white. The trick was quite simple, just refreshing the background after each movement. I’ll be working on interaction next, triggering events when a character moves to a certain place on the map. Such as opening a door or engaging an enemy. I believe I’ll be using collision detection for this.
Also,I’m posting the sprite sheet for the centaur character below.
Once development of the PC version of Shining Online started, it became apparent that a suite of editors would make creating the content much quicker and easier than adding information directly to the source code. Here’s a little look at two of the old Shining Online development tools.
The first version of the level editor was built directly into the game engine, and could be activated by pressing certain keys. The buttons on the side would slide onto the screen in a similar fashion to the Dreamcast web-browser, and the whole thing was controlled using the arrow keys.
As the levels got larger and more complicated, using this editor became much harder. After the first demo was released it was re-designed and rebuilt from the ground up.
The “Shining Online Development Application”, or SODA, was the next iteration of these development tools. It was a separate, full screen application that took advantage of a higher resolution and the mouse, so was much easier to use. It made it much easier to edit maps and characters, and integrated an “event editor” that allowed the user to create simple scripted events, such as characters speaking or changing the weather.
The quest featured in Shining Online Demo 3B was developed using SODA, which was difficult considering the unfinished state SODA was in. It was mainly a race between adding functionality to the main game and then adding a method to edit it in SODA.
When Shining Online was put on indefinite hold, my focus switched to other projects which would need a set of editing tools to be created. Instead of creating a million new editors for each new project, it seemed logical to create a single, unified application which other editors could be built on top of.
Instead of writing a complete GUI system as in the first two applications, the standard Windows GUI is used instead. Naturally a few extra bits have been added, and the finished version should allow for GUI’s to be loaded dynamically from an XML definition file, which opens up the possibility for the application interface to be developed using itself.
The editor is currently in development (as always), but is still called SODA. Because recursive acronyms are so popular these days, SODA should stand for something groovy like “SODA: Omnipotent Development Application”. I think I’ll keep that.
I’ve been moving out of Flash and into Javascript/Ajax. I’ve been meaning to get started on a multiplayer Javascript based battle engine, so i put together this demo to see how such an engine would perform.
http://www.bloo.us/javascript/tileengine/
No complaints so far.
After a couple month interuption (completely due to the arrival of the Wii) work on Spark is back on track. I’m still working on SDL stuff. I can move my characters around the screen with input form the keyboard, but only without a background image. Next week I’ll be working on animating characters within an environment and after that I’ll be working on interaction between characeters and the enviroment.
I’ve fixed a few minor bugs with the site today, and broken a few old things in the process:
I’ll be making more changes over the next few days, so be prepared for a few minor hiccups. I’m also in the process of fixing up the old news articles, but it’s extremely boring and tedious so it will take a while.
Thanks for all the feedback so far, and here’s to an excellent 2007!
