2011 projects

[Holy_Diver]

By all means ask away about custom maps or custom anything for that matter. The thing is though - we need to work together. As you know working on a game can take ages. Whenever Joe shows up he can help too. He said he'd like to, i mean three of us on a game would be alot better provided we all had the same scope and not so many conflicting ideas.

As for map sets and the like, i'll allow ya my own when you need them. My items will be fine to use too provided we are both on the project.

If you're offering to pitch in that's great, but just to avoid any confusion... (assuming you're responding to my sentiments) was just offering to be useful to everyone. Or in other words I'd much rather be implementing specific things people need for their own projects than just making general improvements and hoping someone finds them useful. Since it seems like it might be a while yet before I can get into any personal projects of my own.

-the ability to add a weather effect like snow/rain/intense fog near the floor, maybe even smoke in some areas.
-breakable objects such as barrels - this may be doable now but it would be nice to simplify it a bit if possible with Ex.
-actually figure out how to make custom npcs/enemies
-have a feature that can track equipment worn as a trigger to events, currently events can't work off having something equipped.
-expand the item table beyond 255 items.
-find a way to load intro/demo vids like KF2 US, currently that cant be done.

I think what I have in mind is a more natural progression of things taking the lead from Som's strengths and character. Fog on the floor is not easy I think, unless you can settle for a single plane which could be lowered/raised on a per tile basis but would always have to be naturally capped off by things like steps leading into a room. I think that's kinda how floor fog works anyway. Technically the way Ex blends the sky into the horizon is floor fog. Megami Tensei Nocturne has a lot of very simple but effective environmental effects I could maybe look into implementing. Generally stuff that's not volumetric like fog can be handle by very simple techniques. I want to stick very closely to tiling, so most effects will probably be tied into 200x200 maps that modulate the effect along the 2D plane, maybe with a vertical gradient factor for some.

Breakable objects isn't really something Ex can help much with. You will mainly want to work with x2mdo and friends to pull that off. X2mdl is about as simple as it can be short of being more interactive. Same deal with custom npcs/enemies. You just need to figure out x2mdl / maybe prepare a tutorial. Sure you can't fully customize them without tweaking the .prf files, but you can do a lot. Think of it as already having like 100 templates for monsters/enemies. X2mdl is ready to use. It just can't make your .x files or whatever for you.

Equipment detection is something I will go for as soon as the memory framework is up. This is very important... I put some thought into memory last night. Mainly I realized because the counters are probably access thru an array pointer that means I can overwrite the array pointer and move the counters to somewhere else. The main reason for doing that is I'd like to find a way if possible (without injecting code into som itself) to take control of execution every time a counter is written to. Then we could setup multiplication and division and who knows what else which can be done between any pair of commands. As is to do mul/div ops you need say to do 4x4 four total event frames to add four each time to end up with 16. Worst case scenario Ex can easily shorten that to 1 event frame, though it would mean having a temporary register for every concurrent operation you need. Ideally we could get by with like one register for each operation and two registers for each operand, and between every write command the result for each op would be written to the operation registers, so you could retrieve it in the next command. Anyway so far there is two non injection ways I can think to do it. The first turns out you need to pay MS like 150$ to get a driver license, and the driver would probably have to be installed and it would not be signed, so that's kind of shady. The other way involves abusing exception handling... but I think it would work well. Basically by moving the counters to read only memory, and then an invalid access exception gets thrown when Som writes to them, which can be caught by a structured handler which reports the address of the code and memory, and at that point you just gotta make sense of the code. Even if that technique presents challenges it offers a pretty straight forward way to find out where in Som's code it access specific memory, which is way more effective then making sense of a disassembly (which probably is not even technically possible) and anyway sheds a light on where to inject code if you wanted to and even what bits of code might be important functions, like the one that uses an item or something.

Item table beyond 255. Previously I might've said impossible, but still probably not super practical. The item table pointer could probably be moved to some memory which would have much more room, but 255 is probably hardcoded into the programming versus some number somewhere which could be changed. And even if you got that far, it would be more useful for temporary items, because I'm not sure how you'd get your items into the game without completely replacing all the editors or hand editing the files.

PS: I don't get the part about vids. We have movies right?

PPS: Yeah mdl2x would be nice, but I'd appreciate it if you all would at least demonstrate proficiency with x2mdl/cpgen before I go to all the trouble of that

PPPS: I don't have to remind you that I'd much rather you all be working with the original assets than creating new ones from scratch. But anyway technically you can do that now. You don't have to start by doing a new monster. Do a door, a treasure chest, a new arm, a trap, something simple.