Reddit user SimonLB posted some information (and lots of screenshots) about their Shining Force III inspired MUD.
This is Shining MUD, a project I’ve been working on for several years as a hobby project. It is currently in the Alpha stages, but mostly feature-complete. It is based on the Shining Force series for Genesis/Saturn, although it’s more like an RTS than a turn-based strategy game.
There’s lots more information in the reddit topic, and plenty of screenshots in the imgur.com gallery. It’s always a nice surprise to see new projects, so check out the topic and give some feedback :)
Source: Shining MUD – a huge project in the works for at least 5 years.
It’s been a while since the last dev diary, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Lots of things have changed, but there’s not really much to show. At the moment I’m writing a pretty hefty set of articles on the technical side of the game. There’s a lot of notes to go through so I’m not really sure when it will be ready, but it seemed like a waste to do so much work behind the scenes without sharing it.
The biggest change was the switch to a kernel based engine. It’s added a bit of overhead, and it’s probably over-engineering things, but it makes adding new functionality to the main loop a lot easier. Services can be added and removed dynamically, and can either be called every loop (like the screen renderer) or just sit in the background (like the resource database).
Once example of how useful this can be is with the debug listener. A DebugListener service object can be created and added, and it watches for changes to certain directories. Once a change is detected, it send an event so the resource manager can reload things. Because it’s added dynamically, it can be left out of non-debug releases, or even added via the debug console during runtime.
