The Shining Source

Looking awesome Peter.  That town is really coming together
Can't wait to walk around it

Looking really good Peter. The church textures in particular remind me a lot of Shining Force 3. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together, especially once a few characters start walking around

Thanks Elvenfyre & Ty

It may seem that development is a bit slow, but I can
assure you that everything is going well.
All code is written with the long term in mind.

The town is "populated" with a large number of different models.
Each of these models has a separate LOAD-&-SAVE file. That means
that everything is also coded separately. Ok, it's a lot of
work short-term, but it's getting easier on the long-term.

-#-

More news on the development front:

I got the Portable-LightMapper (= PLM) working.
It's great for small indoor-scenes.
Especially for the interior of a house. On the other hand, the prison I'm working
on, is enormous. In fact, it is so big , that I had to split it up into three separate levels.
Even if I use the PLM for each of these levels then it will take too long to make a lightmap.

These are results of the latest tests:
--------------------------------------
Time passed during test with loading B3D-file
of Prison level 1 with pre-generated lightmap: 2.556 seconds

Time passed during test with loading B3D-file
of Prison level 1 with "on-the-fly" generated lightmap: 13.491 seconds

... I rest my case...

Therefore, I've decided to use the PLM for small levels and pre-generated lightmaps
for large levels. There's also one thing I forgot to take into account:   :/ 

When you put all the media into one ZIP-file, the overall filesize is going down.

A note on lightmaps: In CarthographyShop & Maplet it is possible to choose the size of the lightmap. 

Below are some testresults on mapsize with high mapdetail and 16x oversampling:

- 256 x 256 px   : 192 Kb unzipped /  32 Kb zipped
- 512 x 512 px   : 769 Kb unzipped / 113 Kb zipped 
- 1024 x 1024 px :   3 MB unzipped / 133 Kb zipped 

Phew, that's enough ranting from me

See ya soon

can you tweak the on-the-fly lightmap code to output a pregenerated lightmap file you can use?
this way you could personally go into every indoor area and wait the 20 seconds, and then go import the auto-generated file into your code for that indoor area to be used as a pre-generated file from then on?

Yes,

That's possible.
 
I can transfer the texture from the texturebuffer to the imagebuffer.
(I can't save textures, but I can save images.)

From there I can save the contents of the imagebuffer in
the form of a normal bitmap to the hard drive.

(Is your idea perhaps to generate lightmaps for all indoor-scenes
at the start of a NEW game (for one time only) ? )
   

Hmm, perhaps I misread your problem.

However, as you say - they could be generated on installation of the game by the installer or otherwise.  Perhaps the auto-generator was taking so long because the computer was busy doing a whole lot of other things as well...

haven't posted around here for ages (so much so that i forgot my username) as everything started to seem dead, no updates were happening on any game and everything looked a little... well, over.

But Peter some of these screens kick ass, i can only imagine how much time you have invested to this great project, this site sort of got me into programming and i'm well on my way to making my first shining style game thanks to the people here, so it's nice to see someone really doing great things, just hope you keep on going Peter, too much good work to waste by stopping (not saying you will but so many projects do.) brilliant stuff, keep up the good work 

Holy Wow

Great looking stuff mate

I had a random idea of inquiring as to the chance of riding the skeletons and fighting the carriages but..

that'd be crazy..

Developers here should pay you to come up with jokes for the force members sean