The Shining Source

depends on the amount of time you waste with creating a battle demo - if you have one anyway for your personal testing purposes a battle demo would be cool elsewise I guess we can wait ... well at least we can try...

Coz Im lazy, here's the message I posted at SFC forums:

Here's a little battle demo for people to try out:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~clark4/svb1.zip

Now, it's extremely buggy, unpolished, and incomplete. I just thought I should prove I'm still chipping away at this thing . If you could report on bugs, that'd be great. Just post em in this thread. Please don't mention the graphics or sound - practically none of the gfx are going to make it into the final version, and I have other things to worry about at this stage.

Cheers!

Haven't had the chance to download the demo yet but I read about all dat of MMF.  Maybe u guys could move to a programming language... I think MMF works slow in <= P2 Machines  You always get good FPS when programming in a pg language (provided the graphical functions are optimized).

 :roll:

Thanks for the suggestion, but I dont think I'll be learning a programming language anytime soon. For one thing, all the time that could be spent making the game will be spent learning stuff, when MMF serves my purposes quite nicely. As for speed...well, I could always lower the resolution to 320x240 or whatever, down from the current 520x340. That'd make it go oodles faster, but won't look as cool and will need extensive reworking.

May I ask why you are so keen on projects changing the development engine (as you posted nearly the same at Dark Ressurection foum)? No offense included - I'm just wondering if there is a special reason for that - I mean there a tons of slow C++ programs..... (i fear including sf:ta my own sf project)

Just wanted to say that I put it up the news page .

Cool, cheers Dev .
Does anyone think I should change the resolution to 320x240? It'd run a lot faster then, but won't look as good. Let me know what u think.

I vote against lowering the resolution - it looks good the way it is

"i Concur".  It looks fine, besides, it wasn't slow on my comp     .

It is really awesome.
I mean it. I could spot no bug, and I completed the batle easily. The graphics are fine, the icons look good. Maybe the animated scenes are a little bit too slow, but it's probably because I'm used to those.
The only thing I could spot is that, during the animated scenes, the shadow of the characters does not move. If a character moves (like the hero) or dies, its shadow remains static.

Keep up the good work: Items, spells are to be implemented.
G.

You spotted no bugs??? Wow, that's certainly a first, and probably the last, time that that will happen .
The shadows dont move coz none of those gfx - except the Miles figure - will be in the final thing. I'm not worrying about gfx at this stage.
Items are there, but only in the walkabout bits for now - putting them into the battles will be the next thing to do.

Thanks for all the comments people. I'll keep the resolution as it is for now, and try to speed it up in other ways. Out of curiosity, what's everyones computer speeds, and how did the game run? Cheers.

I ran the game just now, and really liked it. A few pointers from me, though;

1. The town sections ran fine, but going into battle the game really chugged, which I suspect is due to the transparent flashing squares which are used to indicate your movement range. They really slowed the game down, because it ran fine when checking movement with Control etc., so I assume the squares were slowing it down. The battle sequences were a little sluggish too.

2. When characters had ended their go, the camera went really jittery when it centered on the next character. I think what happened was it flicked between the current character and the last character, and it looked like a particularly violent earthquake. I thought it was only after attacking, but it's after every turn, and you have to press Control to break out of it. Looks like that's just me as well, though

That's about it though. Apart from that I was really impressed - the graphics, particularly the battle animations, are crisp and well-drawn, and that's coming from someone whose battle sprites are rightly famed throughout the Shining fangame world My PC's a PIII 800MHz with 256MB of RAM, just remembered to put that. Keep up the good work!

Thanks Newts, those are some helpful comments.
Good point about those flashing squares. They could certainly be a slowing down factor . No idea why the camera goes mental bewteen people's turns tho, it doesn't do that for me. Strange...
Im making this game with a P1800, and for me it runs a bit slower than it should. Now, I can turn on option that will keep the speed as it should, while sacrificing smoothness. Things will skip frames in order to keep the speed up. I'll see how that looks, but first I'll try and make the movement squares faster...
Those battle animations are outa here when it comes time for the graphical overhaul, but im glad u like em - they're the best I can do...

All right, I'll run the demo again and look for bugs...

Ty's not around at the moment, but I think I know how the range squares work in Shining Online. Basically, there's a tile of interlaced transparent and non-transparent pixels which is placed over any tile you can move to. The transparent ones stay the same [obviously], and the others just cycle from grey to white and back again. No messy transparencies involved

Not sure about the camera problem, but all I'll say is it's a good job I don't suffer from motion sickness any more