Let’s see what fun things have happened in the world of Shining Online this week.

Progress is slow but steady. The first online test was conducted this week, with mixed success. Writing software is great when it’s only for a single machine, but once it starts seeing other configurations everything goes belly up.

Thankfully a few tweaks fixed things, and servers and clients were happily communicating across the vast space of the internet.

Task wise things are chugging along, with a few hiccups on the way. The biggest problem so far has been character creation. The Shining Force stats system is quite simple, but there are still plenty of things to keep track of. These stats have got to be stored on a world server, but also transferred to the client machine.

It’s a pain, but it’s getting there.

I think the next milestone will concentrate on more visible things, because I’m sick of looking at memory dumps and database schemas.

Evolution of the Launcher

There are two ways to play Shining Online, online and offline. When playing online, you’ll need to enter your account details somewhere so that they can be verified. If you’re going online, you’ll see the “Launcher” window before the game starts.

The Launcher handles a few key tasks: downloading news, logging players in and checking for updates. If a software update is available, the player can download and install it directly from the launcher. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.

Once you’re logged in, it’s time to choose a server to join. Once that’s done, it’s in to the game world (eventually ;))

The image on the left is the original version, and the one on the right is the current iteration.

Yes, my programmer art sucks.

That’s it for this update. Next week we’ll see what happens when you press that lovely “Play Offline” button…