The Shining Source

And another update today. I put in the new context menu interface for the walkabout maps.

In addition, it is now possible to switch party leaders, allowing you to do dialogues with a different character. In time I will also add mechanisms that will adjust how NPCs will respond to different party leaders .

Blimey Dev, you're on fire I manually updated the Shiny Sword commit log page with all this cool new stuff.

The party leader switching sounds interesting - looking forward to seeing it in action

Thanks . I don't promise any new demos soon, and I expect progress to slow in the near future, but at the moment I am putting in some interesting things. I somehow feel I want to throw in a bit more story flavor and gameplay before making an official release.

For one, I started on a second large town (Talakku) and I am also implementing a mechanism for Tile Groups.
Tile Groups will allow you to lay down multi-tile structures (e.g. large trees, houses or towers) with a single mouse click. Tile groups will be simplistically stored as a set of numbers, and will be tileset specific.

The main advantage of Tile Groups is that it saves me time in making maps, and...on the long run... that it makes it much easier to build a sophisticated random map generator.

Tile groups are now working.

For example, this allows you to lay down a 6x6 tile house, including obstacles, using a single mouse click .

Excellent, that is a really handy feature

Thanks . I've made more updates in the meantime, including a few new sprites, enhancements to the sprite editor, and other things I forgot about...

I'm not sure about an official release yet... I have time to add features and small things, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to go through the ordeal of packaging and documenting everything .

Guys...just wanted to say that this project is still not dead .

In fact, I've added a huge number of new features and tweaks. This time most of them were subtle, but keep track of the commit logs to see what all is being added .

And now I've started doing a slight overhaul of some tiles and maps. The graphics will never be smashing, but I think they're now a bit better than they were... .

Short update here. I made an enormous number of changes over Christmas. These include:

- more maps.
- two new organizations with quests.
- several new battles.
- support for traps, doors (with keys) and locked chests.
- support for notifications (short messages from party members which add flavour but do not conjure text boxes).
- a *lot* of new tiles.
- several new terrain types.
- a new poison status, which gives players an x % chance to lose a hit point at every step they take.
- a lot of bug fixes .
- a lot of new NPCs .
- probabilities for characters. Some characters and events now only happen... *sometimes*.
- Expanded sewers, and two new dungeons.

Nice work! I was reading through the list of commits and saw some stuff about traps that caught my attention. Looking forward to trying it out!

Btw. I do still have problems committing to the SVN repo, as I keep getting checksum errors. However, I do now have a private repo in Github which I use as a backup.

Do you have any idea how we could solve these checksum errors?

Bugger, I was hoping I'd managed to fix that.

It might work to checkout the current version from the server, then copy your current working copy across. Something like this: http://andrew.hedges.name/blog/2009/01/25/how-to-recover-from-checksum-mismatch-errors-in-svn

If not, can you zip up your entire working copy and email it to me (ty@shiningsource.net)?

Oh, I never got around to this, but I'll zip it up and send it to you straight away .

By the way, I added several more maps, and I inserted the first lever puzzle in the game .

Major update here. Opponents can now cast spells, both offensive ones and healing spells .

AI is still clunky though, that'll need a bit more work...

Another major update. I did a complete overhaul of the item system. Weapons are now highly tactical, with properties well extending beyond basic damage, and I can select different materials which automatically modify the source images to give each weapon a distinct look.

Also, the first siege battle is in, which includes a Fortress the player can conquer, and where he/she has to take down walls in addition to the opponents.