So it’s been a little while since the last Shining Online development diary. As usual, there’s been no activity for a long time, but recently things have picked up so it seemed like a good idea to make an update whilst I’m in the mood.

Engine-wise things are shaping up nicely. As I’ve mentioned in the Shining Online update thread, the engine data is extremely flexible right now. Weapons, armour and items are all loaded from template files rather than being hard-coded. Since then, things have been updated so all resources (graphics, sounds, maps etc) are all loaded from resource files as well.

This has added some overhead (and probably explains why things have been so slow), but it’s made modifying the game much easier. Adding a new weapon is now a matter of updating the weapons file and adding a sprite resource. All of this fits in nicely with the new kernel-based game loop, so resources and content can be loaded during gameplay, either when a file changes or manually through the debug console.

Along with the new resource and content setup, there’s also a new render pipeline and entity management system.

The rendering system isn’t particularly complex, but it handles stuff like rendering tilemaps and sprite animations. And yes, animations are handled by the resource system so they can be tweaked in realtime :)

The entity system is a topic for another day. Right now it’s still a little early, so the details haven’t been nailed down, but there’s already support for player movement as well as NPC’s. The NPC’s don’t do anything yet, but with a bit of luck they’ll be walking around soon.

The game isn’t the only thing that’s been receiving attention lately – the website will be getting an overhaul as well. The design probably won’t change (I still suck at that), but the backend is being re-written to handle the online features and tie everything together.

Until next time!