simple machines forum

Oh man, not another PATCH

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.6.zip

I felt sick at my stomach when I found out I messed up the do_fix_circle_trip_zone_radius code from the other day's patch. I knocked out the event's radius instead of the unwanted one! I guess that was wishful thinking since it turned out the other one was too difficult to get at. I honestly don't understand how I miss these things. (Edited: I just rewrote the subroutine instead.)

I also found a bug in the sky routine I use to resituate the sky in front of the transparent scene elements. It kicks in when the sky has more transparent elements than the scene itself, and there aren't 0 such elements. I guess I never saw it before because SOM's skies only have one transparent element, so that means it could never be more unless there are 0. So maybe this isn't interesting. (Edited: When blending skies all elements are transparent and there are two skies for the moment.)

There's also code in place to blend the fog and sky across maps in this patch. I expected blending the sky to look kind of funky, but it's actually perfectly smooth and even. That's a relief. I was afraid it would be a weak point.

I haven't quite figured out how to drive the blending parameter. In this patch it just blends it over the course of two seconds. That's actually what Dark Souls does. But it's not what I have planned. The one problem with my plan is it needs a notion of what is moving towards the new map and away from the old map, and that's not an obvious metric. I have some ideas but I have a feeling there won't be a perfect solution. But it should work fine most of the time if you don't do anything funny.

I have to work on fading out the BGM. I'm surprised SOM doesn't have a system for that. I think it's mute function just cuts out. But I could be wrong. It's worded that way. Anyway, after that and some work on the Japanese language pack the next release cycle will be wrapping up. It's always annoying when the previous release gets patched to the degree it's the same as the new release. Sometimes it's easy to isolate features to a release and sometimes it would be more work than is worth it for "alpha" software.

Here (attached) is a copy of SOM_MAP that can be copied into the TEXT/English/Neutral.zip (or if unpacked dropped into the Neutral folder) to add an event "module" to SOM_MAP to be able to direct an event to load a map in the background. It's just something to play around with in the meantime if anyone wants to try this out. (I've been talking some lately with "Verdite" who's responsible for the Moratheia project.)

A word of warning is if you remove (rollback) this patch or this language pack feature then SOM_MAP will quietly remove the event "module" from your events.

I've also updated yesterday's patch just now just to add a little readout to the F6 display that will show the second map in memory under the "map" heading. You can confirm it's working that way. I'm thinking about how to display the percentage of the maps' loading progress, but didn't add that yet. Generally they will load in a second or so, but there's no precise way to say given that PCs all have different capabilities. If loading is that fast then a loading percentage readout might only be a blip.

In the present state you need to check the new "Relative" option in the map transfer event module to get the maps to change without any visual indication. I don't know if there's any other route to doing this than this way. I have to study it some more if so. (Edited: The problem is that the preexisting behavior likely has to change to let the other modes be used this way, and I'm not sure it's worth it given limitations.)

Of course the sky and fog settings will be a tell unless they're identical. I'm still working on this. I think that lights system I spoke of will also entail settings for overriding the fog and sky and map title and BGM. This will let you designate organic subsections of maps as having different conceptual localities. Plus KFII has tiles with custom fog that have to be implemented for my project to faithfully reproduce them. It's still possible to blend in the fog on map changes, as it would be possible to do with the ambient light if it wasn't burnt into the maps' vertex colors. (I don't know what it will mean to have a variable sky, most likely it will just be a way to switch between interior and exterior sections.)

follow-up

I found myself doing a small project at the end of the day from the previous reply in this topic/thread about converting a useless option into a way to get classic KF style experience when examining items. I just laid down the basics. I still have to work on animating the item transition and manipulating it with the controller to call it finished.

But something really weird I discovered is the third toggle option that hides items in menus doesn't actually prevent the model files from being loaded up. That's really weird because I assumed its purpose was to speed up the menus. And I was surprised it even hides items from the pick up screen... which is doubly bizarre since they completely disappear from the scene before appearing in the menu display, so that with this option enabled (or technically off) it looks as if the object (item) has disappeared entirely from the game.

I hope I can find time to mess around with this more before long but it's good either way to be rid of that funky option in the meantime. I have set up a button toggle to turn the menu on and off with the triangle button or J key, but it only works when examining items outside of menus. I'm thinking about having the other button show text, but the menu shows the name too, so it can be used to reveal the name briefly before taking the item.

Edited: Oh yeah, for the default English I called it "Examine Display" and I'm thinking of leaving the Japanese alone since it calls it Item Display (in Japanese) which seems close enough to the meaning.

Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.6.zip

I found out I missed two subroutines that attach equipment graphics to the arm model. One of the annoying things about Ghidra is it tells which subroutines use which subroutines, but not how many times they do or the places that they do, so it's easy to forget to manually use F3 to search for duplicate instances. I've updated the TOOL folder to complement yesterday's arm equipment related patch. I should've put some gloves on (in the game) but I usually don't have that on in my tests.

BTW today I had to rewrite the equipment code from scratch. I figured out yesterday it had a lot of problems around ref-counting its sound-effects and SFX (special effects) references. The hacks I'd accumulated around it were getting to be too much anyway. It's a lot nicer system now. The NPCs and objects (character models) didn't have code for decrementing their ref-counts, so I had to add that, and rewrote their code too to only make references for each item in SOM_PRM instead of each in SOM_MAP. There's also numerous (fixed) bugs in the SFX and SND references code itself.

I think I'm through the woods on improving how resources are juggled. Next is (finally) loading object/character models in the background. The background loading system will also be helpful for speeding up the start of the game. I'm going to add something to the game INI file to remember the last map you played and assume it will be the one you will play next time, and go ahead and start loading it from inside the title screens.

Important Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.6.zip

I'm not sure when this started, but I just noticed the Brightness option was disabled. It turned out a whole file (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/code/SomEx/dx.ddcaps.inl) was excluded from the build by a // programming comment, that I swear I doubt I inputted. Sometimes the editor inserts random things into text based on esoteric key combinations.

In this case it probably made the video card seem to have no functionality. Fortunately the brightness (gamma) functionality was the only thing I noticed trouble with, but it could have further reaching effects.

I've updated the TOOL folder with the previous patch. The last patch also probably breaks synchronization of the "systemwide" events on map change. (This one--hopefully--fixes it.)

I've been working furiously the past 2 days on shuffling a lot of things around to decouple loading MPX files from the global game level state so more than one map can be managed at a time. There's a good chance this will cause some fallout afterward as sometimes its hard to remember what has been manipulated to change SOM's behavior. It's dicey to publish patches with this degree of changes in play but in this case the bug is too great to ignore. That "decoupling" is done now. I still have a lot of work ahead to transition maps without being noticeable. The main things are loading files (of course) and then controls (sounds trivial but it's not) and finally the parameters of the source and destination maps has to be smoothly blended (faded) somehow. I hope to do this gradually and imperceptibly only as you move away from the spawn point, but for some things like sky models it's going to be pretty obvious without sacrificing too much performance.

2022 translation note

It's been a while since I last posted in this topic/thread. I wonder if the most recent VR post is even best categorized into this dev-log.

I'm trying to frame new programming projects in terms of SOM itself, so that I will reserve this dev-log for only things very specific to this project, like how its art is progressing mainly.

Before too long I intend to break ground on the second map, and I will share some shots of it I'm sure. I'm also working (right now) on connecting maps without load screens.

But now I want to log a recent idea I had. One of the more daunting tasks for this project is translating KFII from Japanese into English without reference to the PlayStation translation. A hard to translate piece of this is how it refers to Dias Basil[1] to hide his identity or possibly an in-universe means of hiding his true identity, i.e. a secret identity. The original translation invents Necron for this purpose. I can't use that for legal reasons, but I want to be closer to the original text, but I don't want it to be clunky.

So I've not been sure how to thread this needle. The original text uses a kanji phrase that is often translated as "pope" (i.e. it would apply to the Catholic office of pope, or Pope?) That was the only translation I could find for many years, but I have seen at least one alternative translation, although I think it may not have been a natural English word or phrase... as in it might fit for a foreign title, or it might've been more of something you'd expect to find in a fantasy story. I don't necessarily want to deploy fantasy terms for KF, even though it is fantasy, I want to give it a patina of something deeper than mere fantasy.

The other day I think I found a solution, when I saw for a moment what was I think an online moniker of someone's pop up in a video on YouTube, maybe a streaming something. It was just the word Pope. It made me think maybe some people have Pope as their name. It sounds like it could be a name, or a surname even if not. I'm not sure. So I thought, what if instead of Necron as proper name the name Pope as proper name was used instead. This seems like it works to me. To explain the difference, upon reading Pope in some places, you might think that it means a pontiff. But in other cases if used as a regular proper name (depending on articles... or lack thereof) then you can begin to pick up that it's being used just like a name and not like a title.

I'm not sure how it will manifest in the translation, but you can see the difference if you imagined we just referred to the pope as Pope, as if using their first name, then that would change its reading. You'd never have to use "The Pope" in the text, which would be awkward I think. And Pope seems like a cool name or nickname to me. Anyway, this is how the sausage is made. One by one these conundrums have to be solved. I'm not going to fly by the seat of my pants like how games were quickly "localized" in PlayStation days. I think more care is given to localization these days even for commercial games, but I'm not sure how illiterate video game texts tends to be ATM. I'm definitely going to shoot for a hyper-literate feeling. Hyper here means I might even stretch it just to underscore this as intent. That said I'm going to shoot for something as natural as possible too, but not unmemorable.

Edited: [1] I just noticed now (same day) on this (http://en.swordofmoonlight.org/wiki/King%27s_Field_II/list_of_in_game_bios) page Dias's surname is given as Bagil. But I checked the Japanese, and it seems I was correct to say Basil. Just for the record.

load time regression patch (important)

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.6.zip
http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/x2mdl.dll/1.0.0.2.zip

Edited: I've also updated these files (and code files) in the SVN (Subversion) repository, so SVN Update is another way to update to this patch.

Since I'm working on better loading maps I lucked into noticing that the Microsoft system (IShellLink) for extracting targets from "shortcuts" was roughly tripling the amount of time it takes for a game to start up since it takes about twice as long as it does to read a file. FYI the new art system introduced by this release uses shortcuts for timestamp files.

Luckily I figured out a different way, which is not online as far as I know, however it's perhaps uncommon to use shortcuts for things like this, so that's unsurprising. I wrote about this in a recent topic about map loading. (Edited: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=67.msg3267#msg3267)

I also added the technique to x2mdl for when it checks if it needs to extract textures from models or not, and this was another lucky find because I noticed that it was always failing this test owing to not equating slashes and backslashes in file system addresses. I chose to use slashes with the new models, however shortcuts use backslashes. I should've thought of this in the first place. This should speed up conversions when the textures are already converted. (Assuming reading a shortcut file is faster than writing a texture.)

This last bit is really questionable if I should even mention it, but last minute I also wanted to add something, to truncate the data in the MPX file to speed up load times, since normally it would have data for every entry (like all 512 objects) even if the slots aren't filled. This makes the files smaller and load faster. Another odd thing about MPX (and MSM) is the texture section isn't aligned on 32-bit addresses, and this throws off the rest of the file, so that many crucial parts are unaligned, and this isn't good for CPUs since they will run more slowly. It doesn't matter in the game because each section is copied into its own designated address in memory, however if the whole file were to be loaded into memory, these parts of the file would be unable to be used efficiently without copying them out, so it's important to align files. Most of SOM's file formats are so aligned fortunately. And not by accident. So it's odd these aren't. What I did this afternoon to fix this (going forward) is to add some blank textures to the texture section to pad out the extra space. I'm going to do the same for MSM files when I add MSM to x2mdl. I plan to do that sometime in the early parts of 2022. If I don't do it soon it's because things are dragging out... it's in the front of my immediate plans. (Edited: I just checked and found a note that SOM_MAP is sending the unaligned MSM data to Direct3D. Edited: I wouldn't be surprised if MapComp is doing unaligned reads too. If so converting the MSM files should speed it up some.)

New feature idea

This is an uncategorized idea I had. I think I will implement this any day now...

In the PlayStation days, and probably KFIV too, when you pick up an item off the field, etc. From Software chose to do something unique, in that it doesn't generate even a name for the item to tell you what it's called. There's no menu, etc.

SOM takes a different tack here by showing a normal menu with the name clearly displayed. I wonder why the classic games never went this route? For my KFII project I want to go back to the original style. I realized yesterday there's a good way to do this...

In the Options screen there's a fourth option that seems ill-fated, out of place. What it does is hide item visuals in the Use Item and Equip menus. I guess for faster browsing through them, it will just show text. This seems like something that no one (today) would want to ever turn on so it's just kind of this vestigial thing (clearly SOM's developer(s) felt it made sense in 2000.)

Instead my plan is to convert it into an option to choose to hide the menu/text when picking up items. I think it might be a nice compromise to flash the item's name in the "lower third" the same way "gold" flashes the amount picked up. That seems harmless, but I suppose I could add a hard core Ex.ini extension to even not show this.

Anyway, this option should also have a key binding, and I may build one into the menu so the text/menu can be toggled on and off with a spare button. Toggling it on will show the entire Yes/No menu and name of the item via its prompt. So this way players can be put in control of this for any game, so games won't have to decide on a style for themselves.

EDITED: Another reason I'm keen on this is just to get the out-of-place option out of the Options menu since it's kind of weird and so contributes to a sense of a game being incompetent or cobbled together. So far the menus are something I've not made much headway into. I want to replace the system stuff with Exselector,  but would like the game menu to stay and be fully customizable some day.