simple machines forum

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.

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.

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)

Quote from: Holy Diver on April 02, 2014, 04:33:53 PM

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.

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.

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.

In regards to the ledges bit, I think that was an idea you had when Rathmor had EX implemented, and you had the idea that the player could climb up objects like tables?

Oh, I could not figure out what you were referring to here. Now I realize when you said "scale objects" you meant to climb them, and not to change their size or animate their size. Anyway that's a relief...

Also I read "supposedly" as if you'd said "suppose" as if you were requesting something (since you just kind of blurted that out.)

The default config file I setup just a month or so back has:

player_character_fence = 0.3 1.3 6.75 7.05

The 6.75 bit is actually wrong, and needs to be fixed, but shouldn't matter. I think I was thinking in feet instead of meters, but I may have just been setting it arbitrarily high. All that matters is the difference between the last two, since that is jumping height unless I am mistaken...

The 0.3 bit means you'll have to scale most of SOM's platforms with the Action button since they are usually 0.5 or higher.


PS: I had to entertain my family yesterday because of my birthday. I have a bunch of notes from yesterday morning here. I thought I recognized your name from somewhere when I woke up. But it seems you may be just someone I recognized from hanging around Sword of Moonlight. Anyway. I am pretty sure I remember someone using Arbalest to play Megami Tensei IMAGINE on the Japanese servers when it was new. I just made a note to ask if you were the same person? (Arbalest may be a common name from somewhere for all I know)

I also have a note to repurpose the SOM.exe file in the TOOL folder. It's supposed to be a specialized Subversion client at some point, possibly the installer, but the reason it existed before was just to update Somversion.dll since it couldn't update itself. But since a little while back that's no longer necessary. So now is a perfect time to make it open the updater manually with the File->Open function enabled (why it's obsolete has to do with Linux/POSIX not having a "delayed loading" feature. Once I realized that I had to implement a portable solution from scratch, which worked out even better than the native Windows solution.)

I think SOM.exe could be the best candidate for setting up language packs too. SOM_EX.exe seems like the obvious choice, but it actually launches SOM_MAIN by default, so better to have something that runs before SOM_MAIN do the deed.

I would go ahead and make it a simple SVN client but I have to do more research to figure out if SVN clients are able to manage a Checkout without getting in each others' way or not. And if not how to avoid doing so.