VMWare Player may be a solution to the editor crashing

[Holy_Diver]

Some of the VMware icons seem missing, probably because I tried to save the new black window frame as a 32bit bmp with transparency which doesn't seem to be working... but still it's pretty cool. The wallpaper could be a lot better. I just tweaked the colours of one of the old Windows stock wallpapers

[dmpdesign]

I like it, I agree that it would be nice to strip out the VMWare install of everything that can be sometime, and its a project I wanted to take on after I finish my game.

What I had planned to do was include a tutorial program on the desktop that would utilize autoit to basically take control of the mouse at certain parts of the tutorial and open up certain files, show how to do some basic things in SOM etc.

It would also have the complete file set of everyone's custom stuff in it too. ‎  I did thin it down a little before I sent it to you at least, but Im sure it could drop a few more pounds.

[Holy_Diver]

I just realized I want to make the SOM windows minimizable sometime. It's really lame they're not. It makes it hard (maybe impossible) to get at your desktop.

Good luck with autoit. I hope at least you have an easier time than I. Hopefully Kilroyfx will hang around long enough to help out with that.

I know we can do a much better setup than this. I think I've stripped XP pretty well. The only way to make a really significant impact in file size and performance of the VM from where I have it would be to go with Win2k I think. I think it would be ideal to have both flavors, XP and 2k. At least long enough to figure out which one is definitely better suited. But I have a feeling each would have pros and cons.

PS: I think we need to eventually make a better effort of custom stuff, then just trying to cram it all in one download. A) I don't think this approach is sustainable, and B) I don't think people necessarily want to download everything at once or have to comb thru it. Granted it's tricky to think about alternative approaches. But we gotta be realistic in this...

[dmpdesign]

the custom models are small enough that I really dont see any reason to seperate them into seperate downloads. ‎  it may be a good idea to seperate the downloaded file into different types so they can pick and choose which ones they want(if for some reason they dont want access to them all) but it seems to me it best to make a single download with different directories like /map /object /armor /weapons /keys etc things like that listed in major categories.

I think its best that everyone is on the same file structure eventually so that when we help each other out in debugging all the files are there.

I will go back and rework my files eventually so they make more sense to the person trying to use them, but many i probably just wont include in thedownload because they arent very good.

[Holy_Diver]

I think things just need to be in sets that go together logically. And there needs to be an installer setup of some kind that installs a downloaded pack in one click.

Some of the lower quality / less general purpose / high polygon / whatever stuff should be separated out. The high polygon stuff is really a prob I think, because it just doesn't draw fast enough. Just a few objects like that and SOM starts to chug. It's not that there is even that many polygons in the things, but SOM just doesn't operate the way modern hardware expects to be fed triangles. Plus there might be other reasons these files don't do well under SOM. There might be ways to speed this sort of thing up. If SOM used DX7's "Retained Mode" it would be a cinch, but it uses the Immediate Mode, which may or may not present problems. Immediate Mode is more like triangle soup instead of logical objects. Still there's a good chance once we start profiling SOM's behavior, it will be possible to delineate between one object to the next and somehow tell which objects are which. Even if you can't tell which object being displayed belongs to what files, it's probably possible to assign internal object id's to some pointers and optimize them on the fly that way.

My biggest desire here is to build a robust data repository, because I consider that my primary learning curve for the business plans I've ahead of me (my life's ambition) and afaik no community has yet to achieve such a thing. SOM is as good a place as any to start I think. And it's something I can easily be passionate about. I think you gotta start somewhere and branch out over time, rather than just creating a repository where any kind of chaos goes and individual categories have little to offer of any substance or coherence. My goal is to build a world wide repository for indie game developers and VR artists.

[Holy_Diver]

Just for the record Todd,

When you were able to get the game exe running under VMware. It did for the device into "RGB Emulation" right? Or whatever it's callled (the software renderer)

I'm guessing it does. I suppose even if you can get it to play well on the VM, the software renderer just doesn't look as nice as the hardware. That is, in my experience at least, the software does not perfectly emulate the hardware nor look as nice.

But on the other hand, like in the CG movie industry. When developing you don't necessarily need everything to look as nice or pull out all the stops. Me personally I wouldn't mind having many different tiers of graphics eventually. Even one that was very basic like standin props would be cool. Hell personally I wouldn't even mind playing a game that looked like very primitive 3D. But that's just me.

One thing that's always endeared me to simple graphics is you can use a lot of your horsepower to do really interesting things. Maybe my favorite thing about KF is the chars don't have eyes... can you imagine, a Japanese product without huge oogly eyes... even in the KF4 manual I can't see the whites of any eyes. Does Demon's Souls have eyes I wonder?? Sorry but Demon's Souls is probably the most retarded name I've ever heard... other than one that was like "Infinite Undiscovery" (had to look that up... god bless the US publisher that didn't change that name!!) ...It's a good thing King's Field sounds cool

[Holy_Diver]

March 14th 2010,







I'm in the process of trying out "XP Mode" with Windows 7. I'm not sure what the benefits are if any, but apparently MS wants you to have a Professional or better version of 7 if you want to download/use this "luxury". It does save you the headache of mapping everything yourself, however you're stuck with drive C: as your virtual disk... so if your Som install is also on drive C: then you can't just map the network share to the C: volume. So I just added the minimal Som stuff to the VM registry with the path to the network share and it works fine. I had to track down this thread to work out all the tricks like making sure MS Gothic is installed and East Asian Languages yada yada yada... speaking of which apparently you still have to have an XP cd in order to install extra components to XP Mode. I'm pretty sure you can legally distribute old XP cds, though I'm not sure how large they are (less than 700MBs being CDs and all) ....there's probably somewhere to download them online. MS has pretty much abandoned XP to the 3rd world from what I am able to follow.

Anyway there should probably be a tutorial for this business somewhere. I was glad to see I was able to use search to find this thread with this forum. I wonder if more complicated searches will work now, or if they still time out. I never could get a search for an exact topic subject to finish before.


PS: I know this is lame, but after I upgraded to 7 all the Vista wallpapers and stuff disappeared. The 7 wallpapers are really faggy. Could someone upload that Vista wallpaper with the koi (Japanese fish one) ... I miss that. I have a black cat I found on the MS website, but it makes me feel like an old crazy cat lady. I had a hell of a time making 7 approximate Vista. I really don't like the core UI direction of 7 but I expect it to improve... the default is really messed up if you keep the taskbar on the side, which is the only way to roll if you're serious imho. Som is no better under native 7. At least search works now (it was always non-functioning for Vista/me) ...explorer still crashes regularly / at random / rises from the dead in 3 seconds... 7's backup function is apparently stuck after upgrade, which sucks because I just shelled out big time for a backup drive, will have to find a 3rd party solution most likely. I miss the Mini Media Player...

[Holy_Diver]

Found it (https://neosmart.net/gallery/photo/view/...+Image+by/)

[dmpdesign]

Does anyone still have my old VMWare disk file by chance, would have been approximately 4gig :)

[Auric]

Does anyone still have my old VMWare disk file by chance, would have been approximately 4gig :)

(sorry for the necro post)

So I'm going to assume you no longer have it? I'm having slight issues setting up SoM and I was skimming through this thread looking or a solution. The map editor frequently crashes a few moments after opening it and when it dose finally work the preview windows are blank.

It's a shame my laptop broke. I got lucky and SoM worked smoothly with very little problems.