Sword of Moonlight > Beginner and other Nonsense
STICKY: Random News
Holey Moley:
This thread is for announcements that don't really belong anywhere and shouldn't require any in-depth discussion to be had.
Tonight I noticed that the built-in English translation was using Flame instead of Fire for the first magical element. I really wanted it to be Fire since that's the classical notion...
But still abbreviations were being used in places. I tried different ways of abbreviation, but nothing looked nice. The old way was using three letters, and there is no three letter abbreviation for Fire which looks nice. Which is why I suspect Flame/FLM was used.
So eventually I got the idea to use some special shifting characters as stopgap until a better menu system with positioning and all can be arranged (I intend to use Windows RES files for that which can be prepared with ResEdit.net) so that you can just put a > or a < in front of text to shift it left and right by one character width (technically the width of < and >)
I reckon that's okay because < and > would not appear acceptable within the text of any game. Not in English anyway. Needless to say this way you can make room and even format the text a little bit because it is already heavily formatted with tweaks for the original Japanese text.
Anyway, it worked very nicely. All the abbreviations are gone now, and I even removed the Attack/Defend lines over the affinities on the main equip and status screens because they seemed too cramped too me. I just blanked out their default translation.
I might even go as far to add a simple system for a generic recentering of all of the menu text before working on a RES file based solution. RES files are the same thing used to translate the tools pretty much, just not embedded in an EXE file.
PS: Oh yes. I also changed the Strength based affinities to Edge Brunt and Point. It's funny but the English language lacks a word for the non-edged and pointed part of a weapon (or anything for that matter) but I've settled on this for the game for now. The tools actually use Edged, Blunted, and Pointed, but there's not enough room at 640x480 in game for all of that whether or not it would be an improvement (of course authors are encouraged to alter the text to suit their own/every need)
Holey Moley:
Here (attached ) is a preview accompanying the above post.
PS: I am so happy with this I will probably bump a be-all-end-all fix for in game menu layouts to the end of the list of priorities. It's a pleasant surprise. I don't know why it never occurred to me to do this before. The changes here that move lines of text to different lines are just achieved by blanking the line and tacking a replacement line to the bottom of one above it. Using that trick no information was actually hidden in the end. Which is a good way to let authors know that those texts even exists.
EDITED: The project seen in these screens came from http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=130.0 BTW. I've found it helpful for testing out many things.
EDITED: if you keep reading you'll learn that "Brunt" as seen in the attachment eventually evolves into "Area". The evolution takes more than one step.
Holey Moley:
More randomness.
I just discovered a trick used by the King's Field sample/remake's shops. How it works is if you set an item to 65535 the shop will sell an infinite amount. It also screws up the translation performed by SomEx. Should be fixed in the next release/patch.
Holey Moley:
Strikeout: I actually woke feeling like taking another stab at "Brunt". I brainstormed a few words that might have alternative uses, but none of them did. So I repurposed a word that I think would have a good chance of being the English word for this if there was any need for it outside of video games with abstract play mechanics. So what I came up with instead is Knock. Think of it like blacksmith terminology for the flat side of a weapon used for knocking which may or may not be corrugated. Maybe with the advent of standardized action adventure gaming it will find its way into the vernacular. This trichotomy is certainly useful to games I think. I bet there were words for this at some point of human history, long lost. I suspect some extant languages may have a word for this. In which case if its five letters or less in English it could be borrowed. There may even be a word, but if so it's not on Wikipedia or in any thesaurus.
Anyway. I like the look of Knock. Brunt, while it had some points, I find too forced. Knock, people will know what it means I think, and next to Edge and Point probably even assume it is part of some well established terminology.
Holey Moley:
I also noticed that the Yes/No options are off in widescreen mode with do_fix_widescreen_font_height. That can't be helped, because that fix is necessary for text to look nice in widescreen, but what I did is a little fudge so Yes/No will be centered in the middle of the screen.
SOM's text layout personnel went to great lengths to tweak every bit of text to the pixel to get what they thought were the best layouts in Japanese with MS Mincho font. Unfortunately that just makes everything else appear to be "off".
Anyway, Yes/No prompts are huge part of the presentation, so it's important that they look nice. I usually work in 640x480 just because it leaves more screen real-estate to work with. So it took me a while to take notice of this.
Actually I noticed it, because I liked how the </> trick could be used, so I used it to lineup Yes and No so they'd be flush on the left. Only to later notice it wouldn't work in widescreen, and couldn't work. So I settled for centered.
EDITED: Also while I am here, and before anyone reads this. I am pretty comfortable with Knock as the third arm of the ineffable triad. But it occurred to me just now that maybe coining this term is even more fortuitous, because I think it would be a good trend if weapons with high Knock ratings were prized for their ability to "knock back" opponents. Where Edge weapons are generally best for cutters who must be able to jump while fighting to be effective. And Point weapons are mainly for thrusters.
Cutting and thrusting are special kinds of attacks that need not be associated with particular stats. But it would be the odd weapon that converts cutting attacks to Point damage. Probably the conversion would come with a cost in that it would not be as effective as cutting weapons dealing Edge damage but would still have its uses.
And Knock weapons would not generally be so good for cutting or thrusting but would knock the opponent around including stunning them and even knocking them out. It's a good balanced system I think. To cut effectively you need to be good at jumping while fighting, which is probably easiest to do using the Action button for auto-jumping. And to thrust you must use the Action button differently, coordinating lunges. Then there is Knock, for the uncoordinated amongst us.
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