The Shining Source

The long task of ripping Shining Force 2 enemy sprites has finally started. There are about 100 different sprites to rip, although some are just  re-colours. There’s also about 30 NPC’s to grab as well.

Expect an update on this by the weekend ;)

This was a silly idea.

Woah, a Shining Online update! Unfortunately there’s nothing really new in this entry, but if you want to see how the old demo worked you might be interested.

I’ve tried to extract as much useful information from the original source code as possible, but it really was a mess. Blame my youth and inexperience for that :P

How the AI worked, or “Everybody hates Ken”

If you’ve played Demo 4, you probably notice everybody gangs up on Ken. It might think it’s because of his awesome blue hair, but that’s not the case.

Every time an AI in Shining Online decides to move, it has to decide whether to attack, move or defend (and heal/support if I’d got that far ;)).

Who do we attack?

The AI would first cycle through every player on the battlefield. Each player is assigned a score to work out how dangerous they are to the current enemy and how likely they are to die.

Scores were assigned based on the following:

1. Players with less than 25% health get 15 points.
2. Players that can be killed by this enemy (health < attack) get 25 points.
3. If enemy attack multiplied by their bravery was greater than the player defence, there’s a 10 point bonus.
4. Closer players are given higher scores.
5. 10 points are added for each enemy the player has killed.
6. Cody has a 10 point bonus for being the team leader.

All the scores are then sorted, and the enemy has its target. However, not all targets are in range, so a little extra decision making needs to be made. If the player was out of range, but the enemy had high bravery they’d rush towards them, otherwise they’d stay still.

And that’s all there is to it!

Further Improvements

The addition of healing would have made things far more interesting, but I was far too lazy to add it.

Here’s a couple of improvement ideas for the next version:

1. Take healers and mages into account, especially ones with multiple hit spells.
2. Look at what other enemies are doing.
3. Have an “order” queue that can have instructions added to it by the boss enemy. For example, if the boss felt threatened by someone, they could send minions to destroy them. This could also be used to instruct units to heal others.
4. Don’t move into dangerous squares. Each square could have a "danger" rating assigned to it, calculated by adjacent enemies and land effects. Enemies would avoid squares with high danger values.
5. Magic and support. Perform attack spells on the heavy hitters, or boost the defence of healers and "tanks".
6. Personalities and vendettas. The "bravery" attribute was an attempt to do something like this, but it sucked.

The biggest problem with all this is keeping things fun. An AI enemy is playing to win, but it has to do it in a fun way. Having enemies do a pincer move or set you up for defeat can be fun to play, if it’s done in an imperfect way. This is where personalities and randomness come in, as you don’t want enemies to always react the same way.

Shining Force Characters

That’s it. All of the Shining Force 1 sprites are now complete.

There’s no time to relax though, because now it’s time to start on the Shining Force 2 sprites.

Final Conflict Tilesets

A trio of Shining Force: Final Conflict tiles have been added to Shining Aid. There’s still quite a lot left to do, but we’re getting there.

Audio Files

Newts has prepared some jingles for use in your projects. There are four to download: "Waking Up", "Dead", "Saved" and "Promotion". They’re provided in Ogg Vorbis format, which can be converted to other formats using a tool such as Ogg Drop.

They’re all released under the creative commons attribution licence, so if you use them in your project please remember to say thanks with a link to TSS. I’m sure Newts would appreciate a link to his gaming blog too ;)

To compliment these files, a selection of Shining Force 3 sounds have been added to the sound section.

You can grab the jingles and sound effects from the audio section of Shining Aid.

That’s it…for now

And so ends another lame update. Be sure to join us in Ye Olde Blah, and check out the projects people are working on.

After many years of hard work, our good buddy Grom has finished “Shining Force : The Role Playing game”. I’ll let him tell you in his own words…

Well, its been a long time coming … 6 years in fact, but its done and ready for the world to see and try.

Below is a link to the Zip file containing 5 files ..

1. Core Rules Book (word document)
2. Core Rules Book Front page (word document)
3. Character Sheet page1 (JPG)
4. Character Sheet page2 (JPG)
5. Character Sheet Printing Instructions (TXT)

http://www.providence-guild.net/grom/Shini…_Book_V1.00.zip

Please feel free to play-test V1:00, give character creation a try, or just proof-read it all, leave any and all feedback on the forums @ http://shiningforce.providence-guild.net/.

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM welcome, suggestions/changes/new ideas welcome.

So grab your dice, get a few friends together and start your own Shining style adventure!

Yep, Peter has been working hard and has recently released  some more great screenshots in the forums. There’s another look at a previously shown town, and also a first look at the insides of the church.

I’m sure you’ll agree that things are progressing very nicely, and there’s certainly a nice Shining style to the graphics.

More screenshots are available in the official Dark Resurrection Screenshot Thread.