Old discussion and screenshots thread

[Holy_Diver]

Ok I wanted to increase the total size of my maps to 400x400, I also want to unlock the 250 items crap, 1024 Objects , Ect..Ect So I translated the JAPANESE som programs........ Like MAP.EXE I used a resorce hacker, I like PE Explorer best:) it shows resourses and thier hex locations as well and lets you REcomplile to make almost any (like you said Cosmetic) and NUMERICAL values.......Well All those stats like Items , Map part numbers, objects ect... ARE NUMERICAL VALUES........ most programs have an INI file that tells in what order the values are in, and thier location in the source file(S)...... From software ( I geuss in a form of of anti piracy , I suppose) killed that information, there for it is lost in a world of binary data.......... If you look at your SoM right using any editor you would probably see little question marks , Where as I see japanese ready to be read, So I did:) this is what I got..... Does this answer some of your questions?............. So sorta yeah were on the same page.......... and yes it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO frustrating, I mean I am working on it like ...Right now.............. ‎  Anywho Tired must sleep:) ‎  ‎ 

I can't remember how the Japanese text shows up in Resedit. I seem to recall Japanese but I may be wrong. It might make a diff if your system locale is Japanese so the ANSI codepage will be 932. I usually set my system locale to Japanese since I work with a number of Japanese stuff and English is a subset of 932. That said many apps may assume ascii or some latin codepage instead of ansi, but ansi is pretty standard way to work.

I actually don't know a whole lot about resources because it just happens I've never programmed an application for myself which required them. I've goobered with them before within the context of other peoples (usually opensource) apps, but don't have a working grasp of the stuff. I suspect I will have to do that at some point with Som stuff because I'm trying to do everything the Microsoft way more or less (except for glib / gettext so far... let's not go completely nuts)

Anyway, if you figure out what you're trying to do with the editors, which I can only encourage, because messing with the editors is not something I'm interested in... especially from the "resources" pov... Still I must warn you that those hard limits are almost definitely baked into the game.exe files. Though possibly not. Others I know are limited by the binary file formats themselves. The 250 item limit for example, I don't know about particularly, but it's very possible the limit is that because the indexes are 8 bit (0-255) and 250 just felt like a round number or something. If that's the case increasing the number might not help. Just as an example. Making the items 16bit would be a pretty impractical venture. I know a lot of indexes in things like the .prf files are 8bit. Though I recall when working with the magic .prf files there would usually be a second byte that would designate like a page, of which there was usually 4... so that could maybe be leveraged. You just never know how things will go. I know for example animation channels are limited to 7bits in .mdl files. Not that you'd probably ever need so many. But just an example (I guess like a Castlevania morning star with ~127 moving parts would use all of the channels)

Further offtopic: I was going to make a post. But it's late and anyway I felt like doing something completely different for a little while with Trismegistus finally out of my way. I started running some tests in the memory dept. It's a little early to say, but I'm pretty sure I've isolated the counters and in turn have a solid methodology for mapping out the memory in general. I will find out for sure tomorrow-ish. It looks like I will get to try out my plan for adding counter multiplication and division (and whatever else) support. That's top on my list in the counter dept. As is ailment / equipment / falling status read (at least) support.

PS: I can't say for certain but that string table looks like probably a general error message one provided by Microsoft by default.