The Shining Source

This is a running thread where I'll post any updates to the game worth mentioning since the beta release.


First contribution: removed a few teleport bugs and built the first in-game puzzle, as part of the Church of the Question Mark.

Making sprites is taking far longer than I'd like, so I'm now creating my own sprite editor, forking it off the tile editor. It will (again) feature a heap of buttons which are intended to make the process of creating sprites semi-automatic.

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?

Well, first of all it will be entirely geared towards handling PNGs at 48x48 resolution, so the editor will be straightforward to use for other game projects.

If people like it, I'm also wiling to enable a 24x24 export, although I'm sure people know where to find the resize tool (it's extra easy because Shiny Sword Sprites are 50x100 with a 2 pixel width padding ).

So far it has all the relevant features from the tile editor, it can import png's and it can save sprites to png. Also, I just got an 'additive load' working.

The additive load will allow you to load a sprite, and then "add" its contents to the existing sprite in the editor. This is particularly helpful for humanoid sprites, because you can make 'head' sprites, 'armor' sprites, 'clothing' sprites and trivially reuse those in different contexts.

Later on, I'm also considering to put in a widen/narrow button, so that you can change the width of your sprite in an approximate manner with the click of a button (in the case of widen you will need to adjust the central row of pixels manually afterwards to reflect something sensible).

Oh, and as with the tile editor, it will NOT have an undo button.

I am increasingly believing that undo buttons actually encourage the bad practise of making complicated and unreproducible sprites/tiles on the long term .

Hmm... a lot of progress today.

Ty, if you check out the SVN version, you'll find the Sprite Editor in SMEE to be now pretty much fully working .

I just have to add the widen buttons and the ability to easily move sprites left/right/up/down in the box .

Oh well, I added the scroll buttons too now.

But now I'll call it a day. I personally like the sprite editor already. I took a character, separated the head, torso and legs (like with LEGO) and I now have much easier time changing these, and composing new sprites with the individual pieces.

Mission accomplished .

Added a Guard Barracks quarter, and implemented a first rebels quest. I also made several new guard sprites using the modular sprite editor.

The color replace buttons are in now, but the widen buttons may not arrive at all (they seem less practical than I thought ).

Hey Devlyn, that sprite editor sounds great
Can you release that separately as well for us?

Hey Elv,

I forgot to answer this, but currently the sprite editor is still sort of grafted to SMEE. I would have to split off the code in a separate exercise for that, but you can use it in its current form already.

Today I fixed a few small bugs and I added a blur button in the tile editor. While at it, I blurred a few of the terrain tiles, so that the soil on the walking maps becomes a bit easier on the eye...

And today I enhanced the AI. There are now not one, but 5 AI modes.

random, aggressive, careful, default and healer (latter one seeks friendly units as well as enemy ones).

I still have to implement enemy spellcasting, but this is an important step towards it.

Those sound pretty good. How aggressive is the default compared to the others? Can enemies switch between modes?

Well, the default mode charges in if an enemy is within range. However, it will only very gradually move towards the player when an enemy is not in range.

In aggressive mode, the 'range' is deliberately extended by a factor 3, and the enemy will prioritize closer ranges over longer ones, but even enter a longer one although it may not be able to attack yet that turn .

The AI system is very easy to change, so I'll just see how these ones work and change them, or add new ones. The type is just an entity specific variable, so I could have it easily changed by land type, or through events if convenient .

Custom AIs are relatively easy to make by the way. All the AI code resides in AIEngine.java at the moment, and the moving strategy (which goes through a point scoring system for each accessible tile) is defined in one, relatively short, function.

Revision #100 has been comitted . This revision contains a fully working church of the question mark puzzle quest, and I started on pictograms for a better walkabout interface. I also made exp and gold giving case insensitive.