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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Was just curious about IMAGINE. It can be a small world in the hardcore Japanese gaming world. Arbalest is a word I see.

PS: I encourage you to get involved with SOM. Most people just want what's in it for them. They don't act responsibly. They just take take take. My opinion of people at large is always ever diminishing. There's no telling what I will think of my fellow people when I am 50. 

So far I have not found anything too outlandish for the platform yet with that free time I had.  With that note, I will get the updated tools, regardless.

Care to clarify? What is or would be "too outlandish"? And what "platform" are we talking about? Regardless, you should always keep your installation up to date. If you fail to you will only further disadvantage yourself than you already have by being late to take advantage of all that SOM has to offer.

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,

EDITED/BTW: The release last month added the default configuration files. The old way was to start off with basically a blank slate, but people reacted bewildered to that. So it felt like now was a good time to introduce a middle or the road configuration into the mix. Something had to be done anyway because the SOM_PRM categories needed to be there so that the profiles would still be sorted into like groups.

Everything is configurable. And some things around the controls are still unfinished or just roughed out. I am about to do some work with that today after a 5 or 6mo hiatus. I hope to have the glitching on reload/map change/warp straightened out before the next release...

Other problems that bother me is its too easy to accidentally jump after running, and the biometrics around walking/running haven't really been settled. It's not an easy subject to research. You can change the jumping inputs or just disable jumping. And I found a good lead on running a while back, on a Nova program on PBS. It turns out that all people young and old fit and unfit touchdown around the exact same rate when running at their top speed.

Anyway things around movement are not so cut and dried and controls are about 20% in. But the fundamentals are all there, and it controls better than any game I've ever played already. I only began working on them as a diversion alongside gravity. Gravity led to jumping which necessitated making some decisions around other kinds of movement.

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,

See http://en.swordofmoonlight.org/wiki/SomEx#Breaking_changes for more on this and other major changes.

I've made some corrections to that section of wiki. They are in bold and deal with backward compatibility.

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

[Arbalest]

Arbalest Offline

Arbalest says,

Care to clarify? What is or would be "too outlandish"? And what "platform" are we talking about? Regardless, you should always keep your installation up to date. If you fail to you will only further disadvantage yourself than you already have by being late to take advantage of all that SOM has to offer.

I mean by any bugs or issues that I have come across when I was testing out the various tools.

As I understand, the EX tools are a bunch of cascading INI files, so if I wanted to alter the game further outside the tools, I would have to change the parameters in those INI files, right?

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Care to clarify? What is or would be "too outlandish"? And what "platform" are we talking about? Regardless, you should always keep your installation up to date. If you fail to you will only further disadvantage yourself than you already have by being late to take advantage of all that SOM has to offer.

I mean by any bugs or issues that I have come across when I was testing out the various tools.

As I understand, the EX tools are a bunch of cascading INI files, so if I wanted to alter the game further outside the tools, I would have to change the parameters in those INI files, right?

To the contrary, literally hundreds of bugs are fixed. To the end user they'd never know that Sword of Moonlight ever existed in an untenantable form. What From' left us with was pretty much the stone/broken form of the Moonlight Sword. In a sense it's poetic. More powerful in terms of a legacy IMHO.

Before you do anything you should familiarize yourself with the .SOM file and the Ex.ini file. If you are serious you're going to need to use the DATA variable in your .SOM file to setup your project space. Because if you don't you will only have access to the pockmarked artworks that From's SOM art staff made. You definitely don't want to copy over the files you installed from here.

The EX variable in the .SOM file sets up your Ex.ini files. The only place an astute person might find confusion is the DATA variable looks through its folders assigning priority from first to last. The other folder variables do the same. But the Ex.ini files are cascading as you say. So each successive file overrides the extensions of the previous file.

In other words when looking for "data" the first matching file found is used. But when the INI files are loaded up in succession, there is no matching, the values in the files are just taken in order, and if two happen to be the same, then the last value seen is used.


PS: Something I just ran into today that threw me for a loop. If you are seeing Japanese in game but are using do_use_builtin_english_by_default it's because your Region Settings are setup to use Japanese, and so the "built-in" Japanese is used instead. You need to add locale_to_use_for_play = en_US. Just en for English should work too. Technically anything but ja should work.


EDITED: Also I just posted a patch. You were interested in climbing, that is something directly addressed by this patch, completely by coincidence. If you are going to use SOM you should at least scan everything I post here, and check back at least weekly so you don't fall behind. If I were enthusiastic about SOM much less relying on it for my creative outlet I'd check here at least every other day. Apply every patch, and report any problems you have. If you don't do that you're probably wasting your time with SOM and would be better off to find something else to do with your short life

EDITED: Better yet you could actually help out. Like case in point, jumping/climbing doesn't work so well because a lot of the MHM files and the PRF files are not setup correctly. You could test out all the objects and tiles to make sure they work as best as they can, figuring out how to fix them where they don't along the way.

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,

Also, word of warning. In your data folders you can put your PRF and PRT files anywhere, organize them however you prefer. They are recognized according to their file extensions and sizes in bytes...

But you still have to put the model and texture files and everything else in the traditional layout of SOM's data folders. I have developed a system that gets around this, that is used by the PalEdit project, but I haven't yet added it into SomEx. That's a top-priority, but there are still a few more top-priorities to do first.


EDITED: Also there aren't any "EX tools" to speak of. There's just the same tools. Authors do need to know how to change INI files. That's development and administration 101 for anyone who wants to do more than touch a computer's outer housing.

I intend to develop a program called Excellector as soon as possible, to function as a graphical front end. But it will be more geared towards players than authors and won't fully replace INI files. There's a reason programmers use text files, it's because it's very often the best way. Still the SOM file will have a complete graphical editor, it will be part of SOM_EDIT, accessed by the Settings button. With any luck that'll be there before year's end. You can always just wait


PS: You'd also be better off to use the Script system... even though I haven't quite gotten around to explaining it clearly. Not formally anyway. But if you work with it you'll have a much easier time with your project, and save yourself a lot of headaches later. The basic idea is instead of putting your text in the boxes, you put outline text in the boxes that you can then translate in your script file, which is the same system used to translate the game. So you'll also be building a translation template at the same time that will be better ordered than if you just dump the text with Exgettext. You can then easily manage your script like a manuscript.

I'm just giving you fair warning. If you neglect to manage your project that way, then it shows that you're probably unfit to manage your own life's affairs. I'd give it some serious thought anyway. You should use every tool at your disposal. Anyone who advises otherwise does not have your interests at heart.

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

[Arbalest]

Arbalest Offline

Arbalest says,

I updated the project, everything seemed to work fine for the installation/update process. However...

I found something odd when I tried to load my old project:

When I wanted to enter the map editor / level designer I get greeted with a message right after the SOM_MAP starts indexing profiles:

Debugging: Inside GetVolumeInformationA

What's going on with that?

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Debugging: Inside GetVolumeInformationA

If everything works it should be harmless. That said, I recently added this because of a weird bug I was experiencing that only happens in non-Debug builds for me when saving maps. Please see if you can save the map, or if SOM_MAP says it's out of disk space.

Then please tell me what is in the title bar of the window, just up to one character after the first slash, or if it begins with two slashes, skip those (it's a network share)

Then try this fresh build: http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.1.2.12.zip

I think there was just a typo in my code, but for some reason it didn't matter on my workstation.

This didn't fix the bug, but it does make sure that this procedure call succeeds for SOM. It's necessary because SomEx rewrites all of the file addresses so they can include Unicode characters.

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

[Arbalest]

Arbalest Offline

Arbalest says,

The title bar of the message box was the "Debugging: Inside GetVolumeInformationA"

The message box had "A:\" in the main comment.

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Okay, so I'm going to assume the patch fixes this until I hear otherwise.

BTW, there was a new Sticky thread added for bug reports (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=179.0)

It's fine if you don't use it, but it will add to your post count, which I guess might make you appear to be a more participatory member.


I'm curious if you've been able to figure out the .SOM file, or if you are just using the undoctored artwork that comes with SOM for now?

Right now I am working towards adding that Settings dialog to SOM_EDIT, which will have a GUI for the SOM file. But first I have to focus on language pack delivery.

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