Sword of Moonlight > Beginner and other Nonsense
STICKY: Random News
Holey Moley:
I just had a brilliant idea to let the tools be minimized by clicking on the title bar. It works well. It breaks from OS convention, but the classic look can't have a maximize button, or won't anytime soon, so that always looks funny since you can't have one or the other...
And you can't have a [?] button if you have the minmax buttons, so if I have to choose I definitely prefer a help button, although that's up to the language/theme pack.
I'm going to release a patch with this, but first I'm going to add a maximize button to the game window. For a while I always intended to add one (its currently greyed out) but I thought it would blow the game up to full screen. But what I realized, is I think it's better to actually just fill in the space with more letterbox.
Letterbox is already a feature, so this kind of maximize can be implemented in short order, and I think its more professional than stretching things out. There can be separate options for switching display modes on maximize (or just stretching out) added later. For now though changing the display resolution out from under SOM is just a reach too far. But this, this should work nicely.
Holey Moley:
For the next release I am working a new project settings editor for SOM_EDIT. It can be seen in some recent attachments.
Things are going pretty well. Today I realized that since it uses a tree setup like SOM_MAP, it's going to have to have icons like SOM_MAP does. I don't seem to be very good at making icons, so it's something I try to avoid. But I realized as always in this world it comes down to me doing the work.
I don't like SOM_MAP's icons. I don't think they are befitting SOM, or really worthy of it. So before I could work on SOM_EDIT's icons, I had to make new icons for SOM_MAP...
I wanted to make something generic for the first icon set. If I could I didn't even want it to be fantasy based. But I could really think of anything not fantasy based that would be more generic. And anyway, what I ended up doing was just changing the background colour in the 3D views to white, and taking screenshots of SOM's models, and then scaling those down to 16x16 pixels!
This sounds nuts, but it actually came out quite well. The trick is picking the right models. They need to be generic, and fill as much space as possible, and look good on a white background. And ideally have good colour contrast.
I am quite happy with the ones I settled on. I think they are pretty generic, even to SOM, since they don't pick the models you might expect. I am especially happy with the choice for an enemy icon. It looks even better in the second screenshot, which adds contrast to it. It really captures the generic enemy feel I think, without being too specific. I like the NPC in that sense too...
The second screen is how the icons look in SOM_MAP. I can probably work on extensions to improve the colors, but I actually like the changes, especially to the enemy and NPC icon. The NPC becomes especially generic, it could be just about anything. It's not male or female. It could be a knight, a matron, or a priest.
In any event. These will be in the next release. The old icons will be relegate to the From Software language/theme pack for posterity sake. This is something I wanted to do way back on the first release that made improvement to the tools, but editing the icons was just too scary. I could see it going nowhere and consuming a lot of my time. This tack only took an hour or so and went along very smoothly.
Holey Moley:
Here are the icons that will appear in the next release.
I made it so full color icons can be used, and they can be of any size. So the theme pack can make them larger or taller or whatever if it needs/wants to.
I think that maybe they could look better with some posterizing effects or something, but I didn't want to do anymore work since I think they look okay for the time being as is.
Maybe the sign and truth glass model are not the best, I don't know. I did tweak the green/yellow versions of those icons a lot to try to make them look better. Good enough is good enough in my book.
PS: I generally think that all icon sets should do the four colour icons this way. It helps to visualize them like little plastic people etc. laid out across the map and it's real simple to setup (desaturate->colourize)
EDITED: Oh and BTW. It really wasn't on SOM_MAP that the icons were loading up with a limited gamut. This (http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/152904/Load-a-color-bitmap-properly-into-an-imagelist) article explains the problem and a solution. I can't think of any justification for this behavior myself. Especially since LoadImage can and does load full color bitmaps AFAIK.
Holey Moley:
I noticed just now that a lot of the graphics say "Making tool" instead of "Making Tool", so I went to check the website and noticed that it doesn't seem to be there anymore:
http://www.fromsoftware.jp/main/soft/som.html
Maybe it's a temporary outage, but I doubt it.
You can still browse the old site with the files in the web folder here (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/web/som.html) but I won't make that appear as a website on this site since it's not From's website here.
Of course you can open if you download it, and this (https://web.archive.org/web/20120216111746/http://www.fromsoftware.jp/main/soft/som.html) works for now. Sites can retroactively pull themselves though by blocking certain kinds of crawlers I think. Presumably all of the images and downloads are also on archive.org, but I don't know.
There are no snapshots on archive.org after 2012.
Maybe the website changed its timestamp for each snapshot.
The biggest loss would be if From' isn't selling copies of Sword of Moonlight anymore.
PS: I'm still working on a visual SOM file editor. It's worked out surprisingly well. It also occurred to me that it's the perfect final tool for the core tool suite. It's standard icon will remain the same I reckon. It makes sense since the icon is an arrow pointing into a map that is same as SOM_MAP's icon...
It suggest that this is where you setup everything that goes into the other tools, mainly represented by SOM_MAP since that's where everything comes together.
It doesn't just edit the SOM file, it represents the entire project, so it's perfect for visualizing the entire project, and opening even more tools up that aren't available in the main SOM_EDIT menu. It can be used to open the advanced tools up for instance, right from SOM_EDIT.
EDITED: The preview image browser doesn't work on archive.org's snapshot. It works, but the larger images are not archived. I went ahead and sent the following email off as the 404 page suggested:
--- Quote from: mailto:webmas@fromsoftware.co.jp ---Webpage down,
http://www.fromsoftware.jp/main/soft/som.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20120216111746/http://www.fromsoftware.jp/main/soft/som.html
Does the below information remain valid?
商品名 ： Sword of Moonlight 〜KING'S FIELD Making Tool〜
販売価格 ： 7,000円（送料・消費税込）
支払方法 ： 代金引替システム（郵便局）
購入方法 ： ご希望の方は以下の記入事項をご記入の上、
E-mailにて shop@fromsoftware.co.jp までご注文ください。
記入事項 ： 商品名、数量、郵便番号、住所、氏名、電話番号、送付先住所、氏名、電話番号
（注文者と送付先が同一の場合は「同上」とご記入ください。）
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※発送まで時間がかかる場合がございます。あらかじめご了承下さい。
--- End quote ---
Holey Moley:
Here is something random that caught my attention today.
If you look at this screenshot, and you're familiar with this tool, you might notice that the white and tri-coloured lines in the model view are minced up by the flat map tiles below them.
This is a common technique, albeit not perfect, since you might notice the lines going through the feet of the man, and the green line doesn't seem quite centered, although it is, but it doesn't appear to be again relative to the man.
Still, despite the deficiencies this approach tends to be preferred by modelers since it generally looks more pleasant. The trick is along the axis parallel to the point of view. The depth information for the lines is false.
It turns out that its pretty simple to distinguish the contents of the tiles from the tiles themselves polygons wise since SOM_MAP uses a different method of drawing them. After making a wholly new tool out of SOM_EDIT, I think I'm interested to try my hand at adding wholly new buttons to the already existing tools...
I think I may start by adding a handful of buttons alongside the two buttons on the right in this screenshot. One for pretty/dirty lines. One for no lines. One for no tiles. One for no non-tile components or whatever, and one for turning on/off colorkey.
That's five in total, and as it just so happens, that should perfectly with no room to spare. Actually there should be just a gap. It might be a good idea to separate the close button from the toggle group.
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