Many dreams have long drowned,
in the waters of everyday life.
Many ideals have long faded,
in the dim light of realism.
Many worlds have long fallen,
into the depths of my trash can.
Many heroes have long ceased to exist…
…but Seolean outlasts them all.
It’s been a while…
..but the Shiny Sword Cloudslayer site has been reopened!
In the next couple of weeks I’ll gradually add some fresh pages and resources to this section. My updating behaviour has been so utterly unpredictable these days that there is really no point in planning or promising anything, but eventually stuff is bound to appear here 
. My main gripe about the old site (not the temporary page, mind you!) was that it lacked the cosiness the former Shiny Sword designs used to have. With this design I’m trying to restore that feel a bit again .
In due time this introductionary section will disappear and you’ll be able to read all the recent SSC news & events up here. The final site won’t be ultra-fancy, but I do strive to make it a lot more interesting and enjoyable than the last one . If you have any suggestions on what you like to have on the site, feel free to post in this forum!
Good news, everyone!
The Java source code from the latest version of B.A.B.S. has just been released. You can find more information on this version of B.A.B.S. here. It’s the most complete version to date, and features plenty of campaign levels and battles for you to play with.
If you’d to contribute anything (source, images, music or ideas), feel free to drop by the forum and say hello
Anyway, here’s the good stuff: Download the source code here.
How can this be?
I’ll tell you how: Grimmm determination.
Devlyn gave me a heap of support 3 years ago to release this, but I didn’t step up and add the bits I wanted added when he became the busy man he is. Anyway I finally got the motivation together to do it, mainly thanks to the posts of the boys giving me a reason to smile.
Download under 2mb, unzip and play straight away! Discover the village of Lycadell and 3 battles with your team of 7 against 8 unique monsters. Listen to the groovy 16bit sounds we’ve developed over the years. Laugh at how when you heal yourself you appear twice on the screen. Laugh at lots of things, really… like how earning over 100 experience points at once doesn’t level you up. But nevermind about that, it does work to the necessary degree!
You’ll need Java 1.5 or later I believe, you can get it here:
http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp
Please leave me comments in this forum thread: BABS 2.5, Lycadell Campaign. Bugs, Comments, Updates : )
Any feedback is welcome.
Download it by clicking here!
Just wanted to say that the bug we’ve been having since last summer has finally been solved. Elvenfyre has resumed work on the game while I have resumed work on the BABS engine.
The bug involved sprites not being placed on new positions during map switches, which caused strange behaviour to the point of crashing. This did not happen on the initial map however. Either way, it’s solved 
.
In addition to that, I implemented a string parser which allows entities to trigger flags or text to be shown only when a certain flag is set. I still need to make documentation for this though .
A heap of updates in this one, here’s a small list:
- Improved spell support
- Added Heal 1-2, Blaze 1-3 and Bolt 1-2
- Added support for 4 spells per character
- Implemented a VERY basic AI.
- AI will walk randomly within range and then attack whenever possible. You can enable it for any entity by setting “(entitynumber).ai=1″ in the accompanying entityfile.
- Battle talk option
- Optimized Smee tile editor
- Improved import tileset and load new tileset features.
- Right mouse button can also hold a color now.
- Fixed the messy SMEE GUI on startup
- Enhanced hit point display in combat
- Additional battle backgrounds and land types
You can already see the screenshots below and the download link waay above. It’s still more or less a beta version, so any feedback is certainly appreciated!
I hope you guys will like it
Today I spent a lot of work completing the spell support and adding AI to BABS, so that you can also fight computer-controlled players in the battles.
Making screenshots of AI tends to be rather hard, but I can show you some stuff from the spells:
Choose different spells, and with different spell levels using a temporary (and ugly) interface
Torture thy enemies with fire straight from the Paint Shop Pro clipart library (which in fact is worse than the Abyss)!
Stay tuned for a beta release containing these features. The engine gets along nicely all in all, but I really do need some more testing and bug reports in order to get the stuff reliable
