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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

*cough* *cough*

There is a new release up — concluding what became five months work to ready textual translations for Sword of Moonlight’s core tools and data files. What we have is bare bones for now. For Japanese you won’t need to change a thing. For English you will still need to follow these directions until further notice.

What’s changed, aside from every single profile in the DATA file tree, is things are now known by their names. For example, the Moonlight Sword is no longer described as “Great sword [2]“, but is instead described simply as (wait for it) “Moonlight Sword”. Just the same all characters are described by their name as it appears in the King’s Field remake/sample game. Or more precisely the names were taken from the original PlayStation game. The remaining profiles are assigned characters taken from the game’s sequels.

The rationale behind this change is to make it easier to pick a profile out of a menu, but also to make way for future profiles. Of which we can assume there will be a multitude. Last but not least, in order to restore the original convention (although as a matter of fact, there is ample evidence in the profiles themselves that this policy change actually reverts to a prior, long lost, eventually overturned policy) a new system has been devised to allow project managers to sort profiles into arbitrary groups, or sets, and all of the profiles have been assigned to more than 100 such sets as part of this release.

The sets are not the same, but similar. The Moonlight Sword is part of the longsword set, so it appears alongside other longswords, rather than “great swords” — of which there actually are none. Oh and! In an unexpected twist, this release makes it easier than ever to get the most out of Sword of Moonlight thanks to some additions to the “new project” step.

Further details (and patches) are as always covered within the forum addendum, but before going any further I must remind you that this is really just one more of many more steps. In the right direction sure. The text is all done. But the art is still a shambles at best, and so on.

First a word of warning. This release alters all of the profiles (PRF and PRT files) that came with SOM. So if you've changed any of those files and perform an update operation, your changes will be overridden, so first back things up. Needless to say you shouldn't be working this way.

Next I need to finish my laundry... I'll have a lot more to say on this later


EDITED/BTW: This is SomEx version 1.1.2.8. Sompaste.dll (required) gets a new version too.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

What's in this release is mostly text edits within individual files, which are in turn mirrored in the accompanying language pack.

In addition the SET file system comes into its own. You can see various set files within this (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/data/item/prof/) folder.

The names of these files are picked up as individual sets separated by spaces. So you can use those to control what profiles appear or don't appear in SOM_PRM and SOM_MAP on a per project basis by way of the DATASET variable of the project's SOM file (actually each SOM file is itself a project. Technically that is what is meant by the word project. A SOM file. Still everyone on a team can have their own SOM files sharing the same project data spaces.)

Separate from the SOM file, how profiles are presented within SOM_PRM can be controlled with the sort_ extension. It's been around for a few releases, but two new forms have been added to its syntax for this release. These are not yet documented in the preliminary/unofficial wiki documentation. The simple sort_=x form introduces a separator into SOM_PRM's menus. Needless to say it cannot be selected and will not appear unless profiles are sorted between it and the next separator. The second new form omits the = or leaves the right hand side blank. All of the sets on the left hand side will then be appended to any following sort_ directives...

This is illustrated here (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/data/my/prof/Ex.ini) and also in English here (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/SAMPLE/Example/Example%20Ex.ini) ... note that you may need to refresh those pages.

You can also see all of the sets that are part of this release within those files. With DATASET and sort_ you can combine sets. DATASET is much more flexible. Whereas sort_ only understands all or none matching. However the built in sets included for the most part are simple flat categories. They are very fine grain too, intended to reconstruct the convenience afforded by the From Software naming conventions, so I don't recommend them wholeheartedly for use with DATASET just yet.

At a latter time I intend to add a new quasi-centralized CAT file format for constructing abstract sets and synonym-translations. Simple rules like swords=longswords shortswords or Schwerter=swords. And I also put off setting up sets according to the games the profiles are from. I just lumped everything into the "of From" set, which is the grandfathered-in set for profiles that don't belong to any actual games.

The PRT files are mostly just changed to correct typos and add measurement information (along the height axis.)  Also the names have been changed to add the basement of King's Field's dungeon to each description. Although long term I would prefer to remove all of the duplicates entirely, refactoring them somehow into a "variants" system... mainly because they're too much trouble to manage individually, and they just look like a lot of bloat.


There is only one language pack, English/Neutral+Default.zip, as the link in the blog post says: http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/text/English.txt (note that TXT files are "README" files. Not language packs)

If you want English you must figure out on your own that you need to set this up for yourself until I can come up with something better. But other than that getting setup with the files here is now easier than it has ever been if you are just needing to start a new project, because somehow the SOM_PRM category system needed to just be there by default. So there is a new system that copies one of the two Ex.ini files linked to above into a new project (as setup by SOM_MAIN. Although SOM_EDIT makes the changes when it encounters a new SOM file for the first time. Which is easy to detect for now, because the tools are made to think that the project directory is > or literally a greater-than sign, and so that becomes the name of the new projects. Of course SOM_EDIT now corrects that.)


Of course you don't actually need English since the last release, since Japanese should work, even if that isn't your computer's legacy region setting. But if you don't setup English before you make your new project, you will be stuck with the Japanese default config file, since it is only copied upon creation. Truthfully you are supposed to customize this for your own uses, but by providing a default configuration, the old Sword of Moonlight 2000 functionality is restored out of the box.



EDITED: There is a slight bug that I realized thanks to this post. I won't patch it alone though. In short sort_ is treated as a blank separator, when it should be treated as clearing the appending function. I already decided on this; implication being that disabling a separator is impossible. In general separators are very useful and should always be used, so that's not a problem really. But I realized that I'd added these functions in the "wrong" order and therefore likely the separator function was getting first dibs. And so that's the bug.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Before I forget. I've come upon a few bugs in this release. The most embarrassing just now, going back to late last year, I just noticed when using version 12 MAP files--which happens by default if version 13 is not required by the project's PRT files--MapComp.exe will not convert the MAPs to MPX.

It's water off my back, but will be fixed in the next release. Which should be only a day or two from now.


I don't stand for bugs. I drop everything to fix them. But if no one knows about it, and shares their knowledge with someone who can do something about it, then it can't be helped.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Woops. The default Ex.ini files should say function_overlay_mask = c0 instead of c1.

I think this was an act of stupidity on my part. I wanted to disable the function overlay on start so I changed it from 0 to 1 not realizing that would turn it on. The reason I was seeing it was in Debug mode I'd forced it on by default since F12 breaks into the debugger (I just changed it to the opposite of what it was without giving it any thought. I threw together these Ex.ini files hastily)

I'm going to try to just find a way to disable F12... although doing so has not turned up any leads so far.


EDITED: According to this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/130667) there is no way to disable F12. Maybe I will change the registry keymap to disable the key altogether since I only use it for this. Or remap it to a different key that can then be mapped to in-game F12 with the Ex.ini keymap.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]