VMWare Player may be a solution to the editor crashing

[dmpdesign]

yoink.

https://www.swordofmoonlight.com/SOMTools/msgothic.zip

[Holy_Diver]

OK,

That did the trick.

Now I notice the VM is having problem with non-ascii ShiftJIS, or JIS in general perhaps. Also the editors launch, but the game doesn't.

I'm guessing the "East Asian" fluency components are not installed. I'm going to dig up an XP disc and hope it's compatible for installing that. But in the meantime, some feedback wouldn't hurt

[ArbalestX]

You don't have to 'get' the disc specifically, the East-Asian languages can be found in a file which is located in the disc. ‎  However, you can also grab them from a torrent site (If it's still available.)

It's your call.

(I haven't tried the DPI settings yet. ‎  I'll probably mess around with them later, since I have the languages installed.)

[dmpdesign]

You shouldnt need to install the east languages pack to launch the game...there is something else going wrong.

I honestly wouldnt recommend testing the game in the vmware environment anyways as it will limit your graphics immensely to a software emulated graphics card...(the game will chug terribly at best).

minimize your vmware and load it normally through your vista desktop and test from there. ‎  you can keep both instances open...outputting the file from the vmware will update the game file both instances of SOM are using so you can just hit test map in the vista environment.

if you need to run som through the vmware, i wish you luck...it runs like crap on mine...especially with a networked project.som file.

[Holy_Diver]

Well, of course I would normally run it that way (it's the only practical way I can debug it afterall) but I would still like to be able to run it. I don't know if it's because of the networked aspect of it or what, but networking shouldn't be that slow considering there is no actual network (so it's almost like a pipe)

I actually think there is value in making all of this work even on the VMware. People new to SOM could just download the VMware and run the games off it (no networking -- at least at first/by default) for development purposes. That would really take the edge off of getting started/really cut back the learning curve. And making games with SOM will seem a lot more cooler once we start really opening it up and showing people cool games...

Another thing I like about the VMware approach, is when I remake SOM it will exist in a different OS just like the VMware in a window, so the VMware setup could create a direct analog to the remake setup, and people will have a lot easier time getting used to the idea of developing inside what is basically a VM (eg. working with my software)

Of course the remake won't really be a VM / it will be fully accelerated, and furthermore probably run SOM games 100x faster, because for what SOM does it does it very slowly by modern standards.

[Holy_Diver]

PS: I use some ShiftJIS characters in my game (especially for the money symbol) so I'd like to make it work one way or another... plus it will help when we start translating to have ShiftJIS support in the VM. The VMware runs pretty well. I think considering the low impact of this software running it inside a VM is not unrealistic with contemporary hardware. It would help to strip down the XP environment as much as possible though. I still wonder if 2000 might not work/fit SOM better. I know it's a lot more efficient. I guess whichever VM we get used to we can always port the setup to 2k and see how it goes/provide both (I really want to push for a VM project) ...we should make a thread about it.

[Holy_Diver]

(I haven't tried the DPI settings yet.? I'll probably mess around with them later, since I have the languages installed.)

Unfortunately any non-standard dpi (96dpi) setting is going to make SOM incompatible with windows. So if you want bigger/smaller dpi for windows you'll probably have to run SOM thru one of the VM options.

I was running my ultra high dpi monitor on 120dpi so I could read it better, but had to kick it back down to 96dpi so I could use SOM. But after I knocked it down to 96dpi I realized I liked it better now that I'd gotten used to the monitor because it let me fit even more text/code/page on screen than ever.

[Holy_Diver]

Got the shiftJIS fixed. Unfortunately however, I'm afraid unless players have Windows setup to use Japanese locales by default, that currency symbol character won't show for them anyway. Fortunately the symbols that show instead look a lot like two identical runes (two double daggers) side by side, which kinda fits in as well. But the Japanese character is like in a circle so it looks like a coin... and the Japanese symbol in the circle actually means beneath, as in the underworld, as in monster money

The Japanese is ? and for ASCII it seems to change into ?? ...but I suppose their is no guarantee what the ASCII characters might actually end up being on any given system, but that would probably be the most common. Actually it might be based on the msgothic font, even though ShiftJIS does not seem to be understood by the locale, so it might not change.

[Holy_Diver]

I checked out Resedit to see what there was in the runtime resource's section. I was surprised there wasn't an icon (had never noticed) what was there was to do with the counter/leaf debug screen you can get with function key toggles.

What was more interesting (naturally) was the maker tool files. If anyone wanted to monkey with these, you could probably easily rearrange the layout of SOM and easily edit the wallpaper so to speak.

Something more interesting to me for some reason, was I didn't like the blue frill around VMware, and there was no way to reskin it. So I thought while I was at this to see if the skin was in the resource section, and it was. So I'm thinking just changing the bitmaps that makeup the VMware skin to be black instead of blue would look much nice in Vista, and even complement SOM better I think. If you wanted to go even further you could totally change the style of the VMware window to be square or something, and even put Sword of Moonlight decals all over it if you wanted to


I still think a VMware all-in-1 suite would be a badass offering. I don't see why not to really gin it up. It would be the centerpiece of our entire enterprise here. Plus it's an easy way to support Linux too. Some of you guys really gotta get involved in some extracurricular activities... form a committee or something

[Holy_Diver]

^Further offtopic, I found out why John's translation often has Japanese popping out from underneath it. The reason is the Japanese is baked into the resource section of the exe. I guess just as part of the bitmap. So it's not hard to take out and erase the Japanese from the bitmap. Only thing is there would be no text there when the Japanese normally pops up. I think the text was baked into the bitmap as a hack around this behavior. So you could I guess take a screenshot of the translated interface, and replace the bitmap with that. Same deal. Someone should bring this to John's attention. I think it definitely be worthwhile for his project.

I also successfully changed the VMware trimmings to black. Unfortunately it's not as easy to change the lettering to white, because most of it uses a notation like = 0x0 for black which leaves no room for anything else


EDITED: Also there is a lot of Japanese still in the buttons. John needs to (John you need to) download something like Resedit and take a look at the exe files. I'll have to PM you or some shit if you don't reply to this!!