Ye Olde Blah

Hi guys, I'm new here to the forum. I've always been a Shining Fan and always liked programming as well, I'm from Brazil, etc, etc etc xD. E ai, como vão vocês, tudo certo? xD

The thing is, I'm not different from many of you guys, so I do have a Shining Project of my own. The name is Shining Legends, and the basic idea of the project is to bring back all the fun of Shining Force 2, Shining Force 1 and Shining Force CD in one game. I'm using C/C++ and the Allegro (www.allegro.cc (http://www.allegro.cc)). Actually, the only thing I have almost done, is the map editor, that I'll use to make the game, but when the game is ready, people will be able to make maps to battle against each other and stuff like that.

Soon, I'll be posting my doubts on creating the battle system, I can predict that I won't be able to do the path finding algorithms and the movement area algorithms since they're kinda complicated as in here: http://sf2.shiningforcecentral.com/pages/mainguide_landeffect.html (http://sf2.shiningforcecentral.com/pages/mainguide_landeffect.html)

See my progress here: http://members.allegro.cc/HansSpirit/ (http://members.allegro.cc/HansSpirit/)

Nice to see you around AlucarD, it's always good to have new projects to shout about :D Your map maker looks very cool, so I look forward to having a play with that. I'll try and make an announcement on the main site soon (once I get some free time ;))

I've coded path finding algorithms before, and although they're a little tough to get started with there's plenty of tutorials on the internet. I recommend searching for "A*" path finding, as there's a tonne of info available on it (a few pointers in this topic: Pathfinding Algorithm (http://www.shiningsource.net/forum/index.php?topic=92.0)).

Movement area is another thing that is tough, but the algorithm for it is hanging around on the site somewhere. Again, once I get some time I'll stick it online for you. I look forward to hearing lots more from this project :D

Thanks for the help =D I'll start looking up for this algoriths as soon as I can, and I'll try to update my project info as often as possible. =)

Just updating, I've started my project all over again, but now developing it in C++.
So far I've already programmed all I had programmed in C and a bit more.
When I finish it I intend to publish it here.

Cool, good to see this project is still going :)

Hi there Alucard, any partial releases you want to make would be more than welcome, it's always exciting to move around a first town or play a first battle or something.

Good luck : )

As soon as I got something to release, I'll publish here. =)

Regarding the path finding algorithm: It isn't too difficult to implement IMHO. Just implement a depth-first search that tries all possible movements until the target position is reached, then save the path, continue searching for a path that is shorter than this one, and so on. With current CPUs, this algorithm is fast enough. Especially as the characters only have a movement range of less than 10 steps anyway.

I've used A* for pathfinding in the past, and it's very quick and not too difficult to implement. Here's a good A* Tutorial (http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarTutorial.htm) to get you started.

That's a good idea Aura4, given the normal movement grid and "agro distance" is fairly small.

In this sense when enemies are far away from the battle and aren't engaging yet because of of that fact, it doesn't have to run the algorithm until distance < engage distance.