The Shining Source

Oh, does that mean you don't want to be smeared when you do release the screenshots? 

Yeah, I'm kind of cheating today. Haven't had chance to work on SO this week because of some heavy deadlines So here's Shining Online running on Linux

And Devlyn, should Shining Online ever get released, I'll cover my entire body with peanut butter (extra crunchy )

Got a nice warning...

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Even the forum hates me

Here's a picture with the debug console running. Still rough, but makes it easy to query things. When combined with how the engine is laid out, it's actually pretty powerful. In theory, you could write commands to allow you to replace parts of the engine (graphics renderer, sound management) in real time. My aim is to be able to reload assets on the fly, and then have it hooked up to a directory watcher so it will load sprites/tilesets as I edit them.

Did a quick test to see if it was possible to reload assets from the debug console. It worked first time, which worries me slightly Next stop: doing it automagically!

Ah... sounds like this will make your debugging life a lot easier?

That's the plan

The aim is to have the game running whilst I'm editing, and then have the changes show up straight away. That way I can edit maps and sprites, and then I can check if they look ok without having to run everything again. I've tried to make as much editable as possible (like stats, animations, interface layouts, scripted events etc) so tweaking things should be easier.

Perhaps you should rename your game to Shining God?

More like Shining Never given how long things have taken

...says the man who has been running the only serious Shining fangaming site for over 10 years now...

So you contributed slowly, erratically, and not always with the greatest conviction ever. Add that all up over the years though and it still adds up to a fucking impressive amount, way beyond many many others in the scene.

But perhaps 13.5 years after starting all this crap we should try to go to the next stage and make that game.

And with that game I mean games like OpenTTD which made Transport Tycoon a forgettable thing of the distant past. I truly think we now have the potential to make a game like that.

ANIMATION IS WORKING

Finally made some time to work on things again and have made some good progress. I'm not totally happy with how it looks, but the status screen is now up and running.

Another tiny update. I've been working on the scripting system for the last two weeks, and it's slowly starting to come together. At the moment it supports most of the features I want, and extra functionality can either be added from the main application or via user libraries loaded at runtime. Performance is acceptable, but it's something I want to work on once it's all finished.

The last piece of the puzzle is implementing continuations. That way scripts can be paused whilst stuff is happening on screen, like a textbox appearing or waiting for input, and then resumed. I've been working on it for the last few days without success, but I'm hoping to get it implemented by the end of the week.

Once it's done there should be enough working to show a short video

Scripting is very very close to working properly. There's a fully working stack, user defined functions and even macro support.

This might actually work.

Script processes can now be paused and resumed, which was a huge sticking point for me. Still a little work required to get it all integrated, and some serious optimization needed, but the plan is to have some interactive stuff working this week.

Script functions can now be loaded at runtime, and there's a new "Scriptable" component for entities. That allows them to respond to game events.

The final piece is to hookup the event service to the script service, so processes can be spawned and executed. The various separate parts all work, it just needs some work to get it all playing nicely together. I promise the next post here will have a screenshot.