SomEx instructions thread for Rathmor demo

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: Actually it seems like I may have forgotten that I was working on this stuff at some point. Also dashing is not factored into the bob frequency. Dashing feels a lot better now that it is. It always seemed wrong to me before. That's why. And there is a bug when going from walking to dashing when going sideways/backwards where there is a pause, but you won't notice this in the demo because it always thinks it is dashing. This is all part of the do_walk and do_dash extensions, which make the PC move slower in non-forward directions to make things more interesting.

BTW: The trip when walking backwards is also fixed. It was only a problem because the PC is even more hampered when dashing backwards, but again there was a bug where Ex believed the player was dashing even while only walking (first sentence)

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: I think I'm going to take the decimal points off the Length for sure. For Weight it would look funny. But you need to stay under or at 9.9Kg (21.8 lbs) to not have the figure touch the label. I think 21 lbs seems like it would be heavy enough for any piece of equipment. I don't think anyone realistically carries around anything heavier than that except in video games of questionable taste

FYI: I went ahead and made it 4 digits (no decimal point) so in theory you can go up to 9999cm, which would be ~328ft. Might look funny, but that's a crossbow or something (that would probably go thru walls )

[Holy_Diver]

I would like to get some feedback on a fix for the Save and Take menus.

It works for me but I'd like to know if it works for everyone or not before the next release.

It is attached to this (\<span> site blocked, contact your administrator/bbs2/index.php?topic=121.msg965#msg965) post, however the # part of the URL is not taking. I intend to see if I can make that work. In the meantime the attachment is called 1.1.1.6a.zip. Just look for it on the page. The file can be dropped into the EX/SYSTEM folder.


Getting this bug fixed is a big deal for SOM. This build only fixes the save and take menus. There is also a bug that sometimes kicks in when leaving the menus that seems to be related. Its just annoying. I intend to see if that can't be fixed too. It just slipped my mind to look into it.

[HwitVlf]

Since I brought it up in another thread, I'll elaborate here. The crashes I experienced in Rathmor were when opening/closing the in-game menu and at map transitions. I don't believe they were caused by SoM because I've never had a menu crash in an original SoM game, and any map-transition crashes didn't go away when you reloaded. ‎  The Rathmor transition crashes didn't repeat.

I finally traced the problem I was having on an XP computer back to the auto sandbox feature on my anti-virus software. I also tried to run Ex with a different sandbox software with similar results (PC freeze/no Rathmor). Since my anti virus program (AVG) and sandboxes in general are so common, it seems advisable to fix the issue.

[Holy_Diver]

Normally I would prefer bugs be posted in the som.net forums. I finally got around to fixing the login issues there just a little while ago BTW. But since technically we are referring to Rathmor and it doesn't really sound like a bug on Ex. Let's see.

Since I brought it up in another thread, I'll elaborate here. The crashes I experienced in Rathmor were when opening/closing the in-game menu and at map transitions. I don't believe they were caused by SoM because I've never had a menu crash in an original SoM game, and any map-transition crashes didn't go away when you reloaded. ‎  The Rathmor transition crashes didn't repeat.

There was some bugs around font resource management that could explain a menu crash. I'm sure if it wasn't fixed in the download it has been fixed in builds since. As for map-transitions SOM may be especially volatile whenever it loads up new resources in bulk. I've thought about catching access violation exceptions for SOM in the hopes that the new map will survive a crash or series of crashes and making auto save backups. Ex fixes bugs in games but can't help level design patterns that are crash prone. They certainly exist. If such patterns can be identified they can be corrected in the maps before SOM gets to them.

XP seems to be much more volatile around memory than Vista. I will often find a number of bugs in Ex when I go to test it with XP in release mode that are the result of bad code. Often times its hard to imagine how such code can even run. Unfortunately I can't test Rathmor specifically with my XP machine because it's a little too ambitious for it. Once in games it hovers around <5fps sometimes getting up to 15 near the edges of the maps.

I will give it a second look just to be sure before the next release here soon since I should test the release on XP before making it available anyway.

I finally traced the problem I was having on an XP computer back to the auto sandbox feature on my anti-virus software. I also tried to run Ex with a different sandbox software with similar results (PC freeze/no Rathmor). Since my anti virus program (AVG) and sandboxes in general are so common, it seems advisable to fix the issue.

I think we've had trouble in the past related to anti-virus software that loads itself into every process on your computer. Personally I have a real problem with any service (or whatever) that injects libraries into every process, and all bets are off when that happens because it can cause any kind of trouble that looks like it is being caused by the programs that are infected. For lack of a better word.

Like when people were swearing up and down that games using SomEx.dll would connect to the internet. That's some kind of virus (or anti-virus) doing that. Also the way Ex is able to interact with SOM looks like a virus of some kind glomming onto it as you can imagine. So any anti-virus or whatever software that looks for that kind of behavior will likely flag Ex as a virus, possibly even add it to the company's list of potential viruses (by connecting to the internet etc.)

Obviously I can't test SOM with different kinds of viruses injected into it. But Ex is open source so any programmer can come along and do that anytime. I recommend trying to white list your SOM games or not using the anti-virus software if it can't do that. While I truly sympathize. I have enough on my plate trying to make SOM a 21st century thing. Dark Souls alone has sucked 3 full time work weeks away from SOM here lately. I just want the damn game to be over with. It's hard enough to get things done as it is.

You do raise a good point though. If we are going to be heading into a bold future where games are made by every tom dick and harry with a website on the internet. We have to get away from games being self-contained programs, because programs can carry viruses. SOM/Ex is a good little media player for what it's worth. And it's open source. You can build it from scratch, audit it, checksum it, whatever. Personally I wouldn't trust commercial PC games. They are known for installing virus like things that infect every process on your system. And eventually when you have so many libraries loading themselves into every program you run that's gotta eventually bog things down if not make you feel a wee bit dirty.

It's bad enough to have Windows as part of every program running on your computer.