Enemy descriptions/etc

[Holy_Diver]

I'm looking over the files that are output into a final game filetree, looking for text that needs translating. I'm noticing that a lot of text about enemies is output, like the names of their skills and the descriptions in the parameter editor. And it dawned upon me, afaik the descriptions in the editor have no purpose in the final game. Or is there some way to access that info? The truth mirror etc doesn't seem to work on enemies, or does it?

As for the enemy skill names, I don't know why they're there. I seriously doubt they're used to lookup anything in the sfx files.

Just never utilized output data I reckon.

[dmpdesign]

The only reason I can think at all that they would be referenced is if SOM uses the name of the action to find the proper information in the .cp file about how the enemy should animate during a certain type of attack...other than that, i have no clue.

[Holy_Diver]

Well I think many of the parameter editor tabs all output the same basic type of pr2 and prm files. So this is useful info for some, and probably not for others. It's a shame a proper truth glass on monsters was never implemented. And it's kinda dumb the monster description box was left inside the editor even though it's never used. I could technically fetch that data for a game, but it would be just as easy to fetch it from a file someone made, so the fact that it's in the output data is not a huge deal.

If you put an on death event on every monster to raise a flag to add that monster to a killed list or whatever you could gradually make the monsters available in the menu system. I'd probably do something more simple like add an in game manual, and open up more pages as the player progresses from map to map. Another way to go is to let some instance of the monster drop an item that unlocks the info. If you were going to put a kill event on every monster you might as well just make it a truth glass event. But you could have it print out something simple, then substitute the description later (via translation) so you wouldn't have to go back and edit every single description message, and maybe so the message wouldn't take up so much space in the evt files over an over (but I guess that would eat up your events... now I'm just rambling)

[dmpdesign]

Speaking of an in game manual, Kilroy developed something to create pages of a book in game through text dumping via autoit.

From what I recall, it basically converted large quantities of text to bmp pages that can be shown in game in some sort of predetermined sequence.

Here is an example:

[Holy_Diver]

^I'm assuming that is by using the full screen bmp event instruction.

I wonder btw now if you choose not to have the bmp stretch to the screen, will the game remain visible behind it? Or will you get some background? Is this how you're supposed to do like an old fashioned pirate map? Or is there a separate map bmp feature for that sort of thing?

[HwitVlf]

'Assess' type items display the Enemy name and 'Description' in-game when used near the enemy.

[Holy_Diver]

That's really good to know. I definitely remember trying that. I never got it to work though, and I noticed Tom had a number of manually added "use Truth Mirror nearby" events bound to monsters. So I assumed that was the only way to do it. I guess maybe he did that because the player couldn't be expected to get close enough. So I guess I just never got close enough with my Truth Mirror in DoM