I keep meaning to comment on this for a while but moving house & a broken PC got in the way. Anyways, here's some (delayed) feedback:

Obviously congrats on another release It's definitely come a long way, and I'm still surprised by how much is in this one. It definitely feels like a good engine be working with, even with a few quirks here and there.

From a purely personal point of view, it might be worth adding a training battle (or at least a really, really easy one) to get new players started. My first game saw me getting completely destroyed by rats. Not my finest hour My second battle went pretty much the same way, but eventually I got the hang of it. I guess I could have edited the files and cheated

Apart from losing a lot I had good fun though, and I enjoyed walking around and trying out the various dialogue trees and quests.

I haven't had a chance to edit things yet, but I'd like to have a go when I get chance. Really impressed with the amount of features crammed in, so I'd like to play around with them. Reading through the source and event/entity files has given me a lot of ideas too.

Congrats again on getting something out the door, and I'll be playing more so expect more feedback (but hopefully not another wall of text )

Welcome aboard!

Oooh, a sprite editor sounds cool! Spriting stuff is probably my least favourite thing (mainly because I suck so badly at it), so anything that helps with that would be awesome. What sort of features are you planning on adding to it?

Looking good! Mind if I post about this on the front page?

Wow, that kicked my arse there and back again.

One bug report so far: it's shiningsource.net, not theshiningsource.net

http://svn.shiningsource.org/shiny_sword/

I'll PM you a username & password.

My knowledge of Java packaging is pretty limited, but from experience I'd say anything with the least amount of work for the end user is best. Either packaging it all up as an executable, or making it playable online using web start.

Web Start might be a good way to get people interested who haven't downloaded it in the past.

Inspiration comes and goes. I try not to get too down when the mood isn't there. I will say though that playing a Shining battle online is really cool, and something I've wanted to do for a very long time, so I hope you continue the project in one form or another

I've been browsing http://opengameart.org/ a lot lately to get graphics for various prototypes. Might be a good site to find some inspiration from

Looks good to me From experience it's always a problem having to stick to another art style.

Looks good! Everything just feels a little more polished now, and the new changes to chat and the battle system really make a difference. I like the new sidebar too, and I'm intrigued by some of the items on that top menu

Sounds cool! I always thought a "play by email" kind of mode would work well for Shining Force, especially as you can probably have a few games on the go at once.

Have you thought about using something like web sockets for the chat room?

Gotta say - this is a really cool project

Happy New Year Elv, good to see around again

I've done a lot of ajax work for clients the last few years - one big advantage is it works on just about everything. The new HTML canvas element is pretty neat too for rendering more complex scenes, so I think a JS approach would definitely be a plausible route to take.

[ActorSystem]

Just updating my notes here - one of these days I'll get around to writing an article (or book) on all of this.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy to switch to an entity/system approach. The current version of the engine only has two systems running:

• ActorSystem -- This takes care of any entity with a "body" component, and updates their movement depending on what's in their movement queue.
• PlayerSystem -- Handles moving the player. Works in tandem with the ActorSystem, so it sets the "player" to moving and the ActorSystem handles the actual movement.

It's worked out really well so far, and once I got over the initial overhead of figuring things out it made life much easier. Admittedly none of what I've done so far is particularly complex, but the more I work on it the more I like it. Which is a good thing when a project takes this long

ANIMATION IS WORKING