The Shining Source

I'm probibly breaking so many rules by triple posting instead of editing my last post, but heck, it's for the sake of orginization.

Here's my proposal: we should use the RPG development studio instead of sphere. It's not as flexible as sphere, But it's easier. way easier. and soon it's going to be made cross-platform, so that takes a load off of my back. It's still in beta right now, but it's new. I'm sure that we can get more product faster with RPGds. the biggest problem will be programming the battle system.

speaking of programming, don't worry dev: it's point and click/parser for ease of use. Now if only I could find a button to start the game

Hmm... perhaps a stupid question, but have you ever considered BABS? Then I _really_ can help you with the programming part .

Just for future reference, Noma89 is actually a guy.

And I also agree with Dev - BABS was made specifically to help out people like you who can't program but have big Shiny ideas. I would seriously consider it, if I were you.

no thanks, BABS is too slow

besides, it works at low resolution, and that bugs the heck out of me.

The reason that I thought that RPGds would be good is because it's flexible without being hard to use. Plus, if there's any commands that we need that isn't already in there, then we can program that in with C++, yet another language that I could never handle. Damn the libraries!

Hmmm.. what kind of machine do you have then?

As for the low resolution thing, I really am not going to change that. The screen is already scalable and using higher resolutions will only make it harder to create graphics for the game .

Which machine do you want info on?

also, how is it that making it a higher resolution can make it harder to use? that makes no sence to me.

He didn't say it would be harder to use - he said it would make it more difficult to create graphics, as they'd be bigger and therefore take up more time. Imagine the time you would spend on a 24*24 tile compared to a 36*36 or above.

That's what I ment. It's not as if you need to type in colorcodes to create graphics anymore. You can just as easily cretate a 64X64 image as you can create a 24X24 image. just the 64X64 image will give you more room to detail, which is what I want.

Actually it doesn't quite work like that. Because 64x64 provides more room for detail, people want to make use of that and therefore spend longer on developing a single tile.

This slows down game progress, which I consider to be a bad thing (tm). This assessment is partially based on my personal experience, but also on the state of projects in the general Shining scene. Pretty much all projects that have made significant progress are low-resolution. Tatakai is the only exception I know of, but even that game still uses only 48x48 tiles...

However nothing stops anyone from using four or nine 24x24 tiles in order to make something that normally uses only one tile. In fact, I might add functionality at some point for 2x2 tile or 3x3 tile sprites if there are requests for that.

Small tiles are quicker to draw, and usually look quite a bit better than large ones. You could of course draw the tiles as 24 * 24 then scale them up to 48 * 48 or 64 * 64 using a smoothing algorithm. Naturally all other graphics are harder to do in the higher resolution, but it's up to you to decide. Personally I think higher res is more of a problem if you're doing the graphics yourself, but seeing as you're going to have a team it may not be a problem.

If you don't mind me asking, what status would you say your project is at? Do you have a team or is it still just you? How about the actual design/implementation? I'm just curious to get a feel as to where it is and where it is going.

That doesn't quite make sence to me. Resolution = size + detail. The only thing that will take longer to do is detailing. This is supposed to be a relitively high quility game.

It's your choice Akir, but by doing this you're increasing the workload for the game by quite some amount.

I'd also be interested in hearing your answers to Ty's questions.

Sorry about that. Sometimes I just forget about what I'm writing about. I'd say we're in the planning stage still, because we've only got Devlyn, and Noma89 doesn't seem to have us here or even near conciousness.

As I said, I am going to implement many new battle features, like combining forces into a single unit. One thing I didn't mention is that I may be concidering taking out the Land Effect System. Though it's good in ideal, it's rather surrealistic. Just because you're in a forest, you won't get any battle breaks. plus it's hard to program in, unless you can assign a values to map tiles. I'll have to do some resarch.

It's actually quite easy to implement. I think it took me a single day for me to implement it in BABS (and the BABS implementation is at least as advanced as the SHF2 one). Especially considering that you have to use different attack backgrounds for different land types anyway.

Since it's so easy to resize graphics, it is also fairly trivial to switch from a low-resolution game to a high-resolution game. Program-wise it's a matter of double all graphic-related constants and graphics wise it's just a matter of resizing.

However, I think it takes me (and you too) already quite a lot of time to make a decent low-resolution game. And the choice between a low-res game and no game is rather easy to make .

Also, the switch from low-res to hi-res takes a neglectible amount of time compared to the time of making the game in the first place.

In short, my advice is to start low-res and switch to high-res once you've completed the low-res version.

That's a bad strategy. If we make a low resolution version first and then make a high-resolution version later, no one will care to get the high resolution version. I say we go all out and start with high resolution (as 64 x 64 is high resolution!). Think of it this way: most of the people who even have computers will likely have large screens, right? The one I use the most is 20". If you play this game on a large screen (Especially if you hook it into a Big Screen TV), you'll feel as if you were left into the dark with higly pixelized graphics. A 64 x 64 tile isn't that big, but still,  it's a little better.


And I have one more reason why we're going to use high(er) resolution graphics: Because I said so