Ye Olde Blah

Hi all,

The title says it all. I just ported BABS 2.5 to Java 6 and am now proceeding to start on a BABS 3.0 / new BABS-based game.

In principle I'll be able to do everything myself, but if anyone is interested in doing some additional sprites and combat animations, please do let me know!

Cheers & Happy Bank Holiday to all UK'ers,

:D

What's the plan for BABS 3.0?

Ahhh... you want the short or the long version? I'll provide a short one below, so I can spend more time programming :P.

btw. I am now done porting the code and made the first two changes:
- tile selection panel now supports using a mouse wheel (much more intuitive than the diminuitive arrow buttons).
- SMEE and "ShinySword" (to be renamed) now exit properly when closed (no more lingering prompts).
- Ported the whole thing to JAVA 6 (very trivial) and I now use the Eclipse IDE for development.

As for the BABS 3.0 plan, I basically stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons but I still greatly enjoy making campaign settings and fantasy worlds in general. Here in the UK I have a reasonable amount of spare time, so I decided to shift my setting from D&D to a computerized version once more.

The "game" will have a gigantic world full of characters, dialogues, combats, sidegames and quests, but most likely no main plot whatsoever.

Looking at the code I noticed that Elv has been a vastly better programmer than me previously, by the way :P. Now that I write codes for supercomputers and all you should find that I write less atrocious and more readable code ;).

I decided not to do a major refactoring. Instead, I just focus on making the new game with the existing BABS codebase, adding functionalities to BABS and tweaking and fixing things as I see fit. This will probably result in a BABS version which will be vastly better and more convenient to use than the current one.

Once the engine is good and the new game is underway, I'll probably also give the Lycadell Campaign an upgrade :).

My time schedule is very erratic these days, so I can't promise any explicit deadlines. However, I do plan to keep BABS fully open source. The only thing I might do is open a voluntary donations page after the first version of the new game is out. What will happen with such donations is a separate discussion, which perhaps we can discuss together with Elvenfyre?

Wow.  I'm excited.

:)

This is the best birthday present ever!

:)

If you need any help at all Devlyn, you know I'll sporadically do large amounts of below average work to help :D

:D

Well... I'm intending to implement a rather advanced roleplaying engine, so that people can create complicated natural-behaving NPCs without much effort. In addition, I'm intensively revising SMEE. Smee is fast, but has a very dated interface which reduces development speed greatly and makes it difficult to use for new developers.
Also, interactive dialogues and subgames are prominently in my mind. The convoluted heavyweight Panel programming structure actually makes BABS pretty modular in terms of gameplay. If we like, we could fairly straightforwardly plug in a Formula 1 racing game, a cosmological simulation or a football game (just to name something ridiculous :P).

The things I will currently not focus on for sure are:
- sprites
- combat animations
- combat A.I.

For now I intend to retain backwards compatibility for everything except the entityfiles. There is a small chance that there will be more breaks, and I will let you guys know when I foresee one.

Regarding the sprites and animations, any help there is really appreciated, and quality is a secondary aspect. I want the user to be able to recognize the monster or character without having to look up its name. If you can accomplish such quality than I'm already quite happy. Also, I am not intending to change anything about the sprite image format or the combat animation definitions.

Are you (and perhaps any others?) willing to chip in a sprite / animation or two?

That being said: Happy Birthday! :D :D

Cool, well once the weekend arrives I'll talk to you more :)

Great so I whipped out my pixel editor and this is my first effort back into it.

"easily identifiable" . . . ahhh yeah that might be a problem :)

before I go on to do more stuff I guess I should check to make sure you've really thought it over and want to stay at this resolution, or if you're going to increase it. (giving so many more useable pixels!)

(http://bad.net.nz/shining/animal.gif)

Hi Elv,

Looks good to me! :D

Well, increasing the resolution would not take ages, but are we able to make graphics at the same rate for, say, 48x48 pixel tiles?

I think getting the desired quantity of graphics is a main issue here. ;)

edit: bottom line is basically, unless you're strongly in favor of increasing the resolution, the game will stay at this one ;).

I'm strongly in favour.  

To increase all the existing graphics they can just be "doubled" . . causing them to look worse than the rest of the game but being no worse than they are now (since I double the screen size by default anyway).

doubling the number of pixels makes it SO much easier to distinguish something.  You really have to be "tricky" with your pixels to do a peanut butter smeared man in 24x24.

I actually think it would speed us up?.. Maybe I'll try a few.

Well, first I will finish the event system implementation, but after that I will then double the resolution in the game. Do we want the combat animations to be at double resolution too?

Not sure what style you're going for, but here's some slightly bigger SF sprites I found a while ago:

http://bg87.deviantart.com/art/Shining-Force-2-Remake-56916425

The GBA sprites might also be useful as a framework: http://www.spriters-resource.com/gameboy_advance/sfgba/index.html

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses! If you need Subversion or Git hosting, let me know :)

Hey Ty, thanks for this :).

I do wonder now what tilesize to use. BABS will soon support any tile size, but I'll need to make a choice before I start making any tiles. I think I'll stick to 48x48 for the time being?

48x48 shouldn't be too hard, as you can double existing tiles and then add details later. Of course, my art skills suck and sometimes I'm tempted to just make a 4 colour game with 16x16 tiles.

lol! :P

Well, the resolution changes are for 60-70% done now, with only the map format and the interface windows remaining to be changed. I'll stick to 48x48 tiles for the game then, but SMEE will support arbitrary tile sizes :).

And as of now, SMEE does support arbitrary tile sizes. Time to make some first tiles and maps at the new res I guess ;).

nice, how can I get my  hands on it? :)

Well, at the moment I'm still enhancing other aspects of SMEE and checking whether the tile size stuff is processed properly in the game. Also, I'm making some first maps using these sizes. But the larger tiles do work properly in SMEE at least.

Nevertheless, I can send you the current code if you like. Would you want me to?

Btw. one of the things I'm working on is vast improvements on the tile editor. I want people to be able to make many tile types without having to click a single pixel in the tile window ;).

Hey guys,

Here is a screenshot of the current BABS. Work is still ongoing of course, but tilemaking is already a lot easier with this new editor :).

(http://ccs.chem.ucl.ac.uk/~derek/babs3-screen.png)

As of today the game supports interactive dialogues/prompts. Players can be provided with up to 9 dialogue options, each of which may trigger a specific game event.

There is only one main engine task remaining for now, which is resizing all in-game windows to fit the new tilesize and resolution. In addition to that I'll make a simple demo game thingy, and I might well release a beta version of the new BABS :).

BABS is now rat-enabled (and more and more properly supporting its new resolution ;)).

(http://ccs.chem.ucl.ac.uk/~derek/babs3-screen3.png)

What I added:

-Organization membership.
-A speech factory.
-if-branching for dialogues and other events. Sounds all trivial, but both these things will make the gameplay a lot deeper.
-A mechanism for party members to join.
-Morale boosts for monsters that kick your ass in combat :D.
-Chairs and tables.
-A fully working Fireball spell


And lots of other obscure things ;).

nice work :)

so is the old flag system gone now?

Nope. :P

It is, however, greatly improved and extended. But also the old scripting should still work :).