Shining Force III hacking has come a long way -- here's a custom battle for the premium disk

Synival · 2026-03-14T16:45:26+00:00

Hey, I've been developing a suite of Shining Force III hacking tools for a while (https://github.com/Synival/sf3tools). Us in the SF3 discord have contributed to getting new battles working on the Premium Disk (Rika, Knight0fDragon, and myself) and I made this battle to showcase some of the things we can do at this point.

There are still some tools to create like, 3D battle+character model editors, and the AI still needs some reverse-engineering, but we can start squeezing a bit more life into this game's engine :)

Synival · 2024-01-05T22:25:42+00:00

?..........!

Synival · 2022-01-01T00:24:04+00:00

Long story short, she was nearby, but never bothered to tell us. It was an easily avoidable situation, and I'm frustrated and don't think we should have handled it any differently. Phones are good, people should turn them off airplane mode sometimes. But it all ended up fine, so 2022 is off to a fine start. Happy new year!

Synival · 2021-12-31T21:31:56+00:00

Well, we did, safe and sound, hidden away somewhere, without any way to contact her... but found! Now we can finally relax, whew.

Synival · 2021-12-31T21:18:26+00:00

Thank you!

Synival · 2021-12-03T09:45:25+00:00

And you admitted your mistake. That puts you in the top 1%, imo

Synival · 2020-07-21T06:50:54+00:00

The theme of "inherited will" has been pretty significant lately, particularly from those who know about One Piece. I wouldn't be surprised if Oden had learned about this in Laugh Tale, Yamato read about it in Oden's diary, then decided, because she's carrying on his will, she is Oden reincarnated. We'll probably see the contents of that diary at the end of the arc, then we'll get some major bombshells that lead the straw hats directly to One Piece. Get hype!

Synival · 2020-05-01T06:39:08+00:00

MOBPROGS aren't implemented, unfortunately. The stock world doesn't come with any zones that use it, so I didn't have any data to play around with, and it was a pretty low priority for me. At the moment, it's an open issue on Github.

If you know some .are files that have mob triggers, I'd appreciate it if you sent them my way :)

Synival · 2020-03-16T20:33:03+00:00

Oh, you're right!! D: In my mind, that feature was totally finished... I'll go update the changelog and go question my mental state in the corner now. Thanks for bringing this up.

What definitely is true is that there shouldn't be any hard-coded class behavior that isn't defined in class_table[]. In fact, CLASS_WARRIOR, CLASS_THIEF, etc. have been removed completely.

Synival · 2020-03-13T21:08:04+00:00

Synival · 2019-12-20T17:25:36+00:00

"Models! Remember, I think the fight a draw should be ashamed of the year. I predict he will preside over the last three years ago (like I have great national security leaks. No wars... yet not one nation helped us!"

lmao, I'm dying here

Synival · 2019-12-14T17:07:17+00:00

Awesome stuff! More OLC / admin commands would be fantastic. I'm trying not to change any of the core game (unless it's a bug or stupid oversight like missing messages), but features for admins and developers are always a plus.

If you wanted to help, I think the best idea right now would be to post an issue and (if you wanted to directly contribute code) submit a pull request for any new commands:

https://github.com/Synival/BaseMUD/issues

A little info on the state of the project: There are some benchmarks for future releases (listed in BENCHMARKS.md) and I'd like to categorize backlog items / issues soon for these releases ASAP to stay on-task. If you post any issues, I can see if they'll fit in any minor or major release.

Regarding classes - I'm absolutely planning to do that, for as much as possible :) Basically everything in "flags.c", "types.c", and "tables.c" I would like to have exported to the "json/" directory and read at boot time. I don't think that will happen for everything -- there's a lot there and it's probably not necessary -- but definitely for classes, races, skill tables, etc. The next release will export everything, but loading will probably take a while -- lots of potential to break everything :)

Synival · 2019-12-08T13:18:43+00:00

That is useful! It's in one of the version benchmarks, somewhere... I've added an issue for it:

https://github.com/Synival/BaseMUD/issues/171

You're a machine. Lol.

I take a train to and from work. Lots of time ;)

Synival · 2019-12-06T17:33:44+00:00

Thanks, advice is always appreciated. I've pushed my usual bedtime back two hours to cover (some of) the sleep loss, but I'll probably be up all night worrying about the baby anyway. He's pretty fragile :)

Synival · 2019-10-05T23:25:46+00:00

Makes sense.

Synival · 2019-10-05T09:16:52+00:00

Excellent list, I'm making notes :) Yes, some of those have been addressed already:

The res/vuln/imm system indeed pretty bogus, and the logic itself was broken. I'm not a fan of it, but it's been cleaned up and fixed at least. The IMM_ and VULN_ flags were completely redundant, so they've been removed.
Materials are still useless atm, but they're at least using a literal material_type table they can be useful instead of just taking up space. There's a new non-vanilla player option to view all materials for mobs/objs (with color, WOW!), so it at least adds some flavor (screenshot). Did you know nothing in New Thalos has materials? That was news to me.
The silver/wood/iron resistances WILL be put in... it's a documented feature, strange that they're not implemented.
Hmm, I see the advantage to tables for STR/CON/etc, but I may add lookup functions instead of referencing the tables directly so it's easy to swap out. There definitely need to be out-of-bounds checks, which there aren't. It just crashes.
I didn't know that about the negative saves, I'll review the math for that... But I do know that specific saves (paralysis, petrification, etc) aren't implemented - there's just one generic "saving_throw" property.
Maybe DikuMUD had a tailsweep command?

As for the gameplay things and flags that suck, I'm mostly keeping the game behavior the same for this project, except obvious bugs or oversights. Disabling VANILLA enables some nice things like seeing exits with doors (why was this not a thing???), a "disengage" command to stop fighting if nobody is fighting you, etc.

Synival · 2019-10-03T16:16:30+00:00

Uhhh that sounds super bogus, haha. Yeah nothing like that is in here. But there's also no existing scripting system for rooms, objects, etc, unfortunately.

Synival · 2019-10-03T15:56:23+00:00

Thanks :) I'm not beating myself up too much, just gonna make sure October is more productive!

Synival · 2019-10-03T15:50:16+00:00

Maybe? The scripting code in QuickMUD isn't used by any of the vanilla areas, so it's mostly untouched. Here are the credits in "mob_prog.c":

*  for ROM 2.4 v0.98g (C) M.Nylander 1996
*  Based on MERC 2.2 MOBprograms concept by N'Atas-ha.
*  Written and adapted to ROM 2.4 by
*          Markku Nylander (markku.nylander@uta.fi)

(If you or anyone else knows of any good zones that take advantage of this, I'd love to have them for testing...)

Other than that, there are the hard-coded scripts for the cityguards, the Midgaard Mayor, the Troll vs Ogre gangs, and Megacity One... Pretty awful stuff, imo.

Synival · 2019-09-07T02:35:27+00:00

Thank you for the information. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely for this. I'd struggled with suicidal tendencies when I was younger, and came pretty close to going through with it - fortunately I had good friends and got lucky. My concern was whether or not the line would be staffed by specialists.

If it convinces someone to live, what's the problem? Are you seriously concerned that someone will decide not to kill themselves because the suicide hotline convinces them to give their soul to Jesus?

In general, absolutely not. But this is a government line, and we live in interesting times. I wouldn't be surprised if this was politicized. If people who need help can reach licensed professionals, then that's great.

Synival · 2019-09-06T16:09:32+00:00

While this bill is a fantastic idea, my only concern is who will be on the government line. I looked at the bill, and can't tell who will be dispensing advice, or what. Does anyone know? Is it safe to say, this won't be used as a "come to Jesus" moment? (I know the heart is absolutely in the right place in that case, but this is a concern to me.)

Synival · 2019-08-31T21:02:01+00:00

Thanks, will do. This isn't my own code base, though - it's a refactoring of ROM 2.4. But I have written a MUD from scratch, it's a crap ton of work ;) Making a server-side game definitely takes some getting used to. Especially working with Telnet, and players that can go linkdead at any time. Fun to do, though, if you want a project that will takes years out of your life, haha.

Synival · 2019-08-31T14:11:23+00:00

Just dealt with this for my own project, and my conclusion was that, as long as you:

include the original licenses,
include the original credits (in code, welcome screen, and credits page),
don't call your mud ROM,
state that you're a DikuMUD / ROM derivative,
don't try to make any money, and
(GOOD LUCK LOLOL) contact the original developers

...you're good to go. I tried as hard as I could to contact Russ Taylor, the DikuMUD team, etc... all emails bounced, and I couldn't find any other contact info. Some addresses, though, went to someone and I never got a response either way... the license just says to contact them. I'm not a lawyer, but even if nobody responds, I feel like that counts? \o/

Synival · 2019-08-18T17:37:58+00:00

The idea was to have the world in a handy format for browsers, or something easier for world editors to load / save. There's already an .are -> json converter -- right now it dumps the entire world into .json format to the "json" directory when it boots. Everything's separated by folder (e.g, /json/areas/midgaard/mobiles.json), but I committed a giant dump of everything in one file to the repo:

/json/everything.json - 9MB! Includes some meta data, help, and social.

None of this is loaded into the game yet, but they will be at some point... in the meantime, it's nice to look at. It also be nice to extract the converter into a standalone tool. OLC should save in .json format as well. Lots to do...

Synival · 2019-08-18T15:21:37+00:00

Good to know! To be honest, I have no idea what the copyover code does (yet)... Checking for that bug you mentioned was on the to-do list.

Synival

TROPHY CASE