So I have been thinking on this long and hard for months, poking around at the idea of getting help to overhaul my SoM game's graphics, restructuring maps to improve poorly made areas and so on. I have also dabbled in Unity over the past year and have come to terms that I am going to lay to rest the idea of revamping my SoM game, for these reasons:
#1 the scope of what I want to create goes beyond what SoM can really handle, for a time I had hopes that SomEx might give me some of the game functionality that I was after: projectiles, falling damage calculation that wasn't event heavy, events that could detect equipped items, map sets that could handle multi leveled depths more cleanly, a better lighting/shading engine, higher texture quality with bump maps and so on. I cam to the realization of what I wanted to accomplish was not meant for SoM, and what I had made with the tool should remain faithful to its design.
#2 I played through the game recently for the first time since I made it, so I could try to help some folks looking for certain items in the game. I actually changed my mind about what I wanted to overhaul...yes there are still a few sections I want to see fixed properly (like that god awful tower I have in the castle area), but that is not a giant project and something I can fix with a bit of help from a good modeller friend I know ;).
#3 Cost...to do some of the things I had in mind meant hiring some folks to do work for me, and at the end of the day, a game attached to the KF intellectual property will never give me a monetary return on investment.
So to that end, DD will get a few updates I had mentioned in another post - such as improved textures to the cliffside set, improved custom models in some areas that are severely lacking, a single new map area with new enemies and so on, but it will remain mostly as it is now, with the features/functionality of the game.
For the future of the series, its attachment to the King's Field universe will be coming to an end...so that leads me to the next part of the reboot project.
Dark Destiny on Unity
I have decided on creating an entirely brand new experience with the Unity engine, still staying faithful to many key elements of the SoM project, but with an entirely new world, current generation graphics, possible multiplayer and a much more epic game experience overall. It will be a minimum 18 month project and will include the following:
â⬠¢ All new game experience, played in first person (like King's Field), with a truly open ended environment, akin to the KF series and to a lesser extent the dark souls series. The game will take place on a much larger island than my SoM made game (think somewhere between melanat and morrowind size), with hints at a few of the same landmarks that made Melanat so cool.
â⬠¢ The game world will be dark, but not as dismal as Dark Souls, it will most certainly not be about undead people. I do prefer Dark Souls loot tables over the procedural loot of games like Skyrim, so the items in my game will have purpose and not be random. That isnt to say you may not find a crappy dagger halfway through the game, but the unique items will be unique and not something like eagle short sword of the rabbit +1. I am a firm believer that everything in a game should have a purpose...just like the KF games did it.
â⬠¢ There will be epic bosses, with real AI, but I do not want to or plan to confine them into sections such as Dark Souls made them. I am not a fan of forced environments, where you pass through a white bit of fog and you are stuck in a boss room until you win or die. This is where I hope to be unique among games of the genre, I want the bosses to meld with their surroundings naturally, like mamma kracken in KF..she just lives on the west shore of the island, she isnt in a confined room with a treasure chest stuck behind her and the key to the next area of the game. I hate that sort of thing a lot...I really try to keep the keys and the rails of gameplay to a minimum.
â⬠¢Continuing with the confinement stuff - I do not like mobs that are placed in a walkway just idly waiting for eternity for you to show up. I am sure I wont be able to avoid it entirely, but it frustrates me to no end that designers do not attempt more often to make enemy appearance more natural. One of the parts I really liked about the first Dark Souls was the hydra down in the Darkroot Valley, it felt like it belonged in that lake, that it lived there, slept there and ate there and didnt care if I ever came by. In fact he was entirely optional. He was not some omniscient being that lived its life watching me in some crystal ball saying, yep today is the day he comes to my lake so I am going to stand there at the ready until he walks by. That sort of thing is nonsense and breaks the seamlessness of gaming. IMO dark souls 1 did a better job at this than DS 2 did.
â⬠¢ I am aiming for 80 hours of gameplay in my game, I do not want to make it a grind fest, requiring you to level a million times to get through the game, but I also do not plan on making island travel as simple as DS2 did by allowing you to warp around the whole game from the get go.
â⬠¢ Multiplayer is something that may come down the road, if I can get in a good spot with this game, I may have enough connections at that point to make a real attempt at a kickstarter project, and get some funding to allow me to hire networking folks to program it. If I end up featuring multiplayer it will be based around 2-3 player coop maximum, and IF (big if) I allow pvp it will not be the random invasion crap, you will have to opt in/out of pvp invasions - i dont feel its necessary to force people who want to enjoy a coop game with their friends to have to put up with invasions by people who want to grief you over and over. And also, co-op can be random or by invite, so people who actually have friends in the real world can simply go to their friends list and invite them to their game. I also do not plan to make it where if you kill a boss your summoned help leaves...that stuff is nonsense too.
So that is more or less where I am at...I am keeping the title of the game (at least partially at this point) but I am separating it from its KF roots and making the story not use any of the from software intellectual property. My plan is to actually sell this game via Steam and maybe a few other channels within probably 2-2.5 years from now.
Hopefully I will be able to update this post to a nice board at some point with progress that you can see etc. Hopefully no one is annoyed that I am not using SoM for my next project :)
Attached are some new Ranged Traps made with the PRF Editor. They just use SoM's stock resources so nothing new is required besides the prf files. Put those in the "DATA\OBJ\prof" folder. They'll show up in parameter editor under "Trap Ranged" 3a-3e and include rock, fire wind etc. The wind trap even seeks the player!
Apparently some screenshots of Fromsoft's next game, Project Beast, were leaked today. From what I can tell it definitely looks like a very Souls-ish game, and the horror-vibe they seem to be going for is quite interesting. What makes me happy more than anything though, is that the game is (allegedly) being directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. Especially after how dissapointing Dark Souls 2 was, it's good to see that he's back on board.
My guess is that it'll be officially revealed at this year's E3, and hey, maybe this will give people a reason to buy a PS4!
Edit: Problem solved! I just noticed there was a hidden untextured face inside the stair model that probably got unknowingly placed there when I made the primitive for the ceiling, all I had to do was delete it .
Hello all, I made this custom stair model using Metasequoia, and converted it to use as a map piece with the SOM Helper Tool. After placing the texture, msm, and mhm files in their respective folders, it'll show up in the SOM editor, but when I go to place the piece and click compile, the compiler crashes and I get these errors: "MAP033 error code [-1073741818]" then "MAP012 Compile Fail", any idea what the problem is? I've imported my own map pieces with extensions before and they've worked fine, but were much less complex, maybe it's a problem with the model itself?
Attached are images of the model and how I plan on using it in the map editor, if it helps.
Anyone else feel that lifts detract from the series' overall medieval, low tech, primal atmosphere? At first when I used lifts in DS1, I thought it gave the game depth, made it seem like you were ascending into somewhere not easily escapable. But since I have been playing DS2, I noticed a number of out of place lifts, placed in convenient locations, contrasting the natural feel of DS1.
I am curious as to why lifts take prescedence over stairs or natural inclines in the newest masterpiece.
I found a cheap and pre-owned Eternal Ring game on the net but it's covers and manual are only in German. Do you think that game will support in-game English language? Or is it just a German language version?
ORIGINAL POST:
So I've been bouncing back and forth between numerous ideas for a short spring side-project to create in SOM, and I think I've finally settled on the idea of a quaint revisit to the isle of Melanat. Below is a quick rundown of what I have planned so far, but please note that this probably isn't as detailed as it should be, as I'm still in the early conceptual stage of development.
To start, the game will take place on Melanat about 50 years after the events of King's Field 3 and will be more light-hearted than past games, this is to remain consistent with the ending of KF3, where Lyle ushers a new age of light into the world of Verdite after having defeated Seath. The exact details of the story are still a work in progress, but the main plot will center around the player character who is a descendent of Lyle Forester, and the main goal (as per usual) will be to retrieve the Moonlight Sword from the island of Melanat.
The levels will, in theory, will be scaled recreations of Melanat's levels as seen in KF2 (minus certain multi-leveled sections). One major difference, however, will be the addition of a large 'Holy' Temple, built long ago in the center of the island to honor a legendary hero of light (Lyle Forester). This single most important venue will change how the maps in Melanat are interconnected.
The gameplay will be your standard King's Field affair, but I do plan on making a huge effort to balance enemies and make every item useful. I want for everything to have a use, in other words, no tier-based nonsense like we've seen in a lot of grind-y RPGs in the past. Puzzles will also be somewhat prevalent, though not as major as the focus on exploration and discovery.
As I stated above, the game won't be dark and bleak like the past games in the series, though I do still intend to retain the isolated atmosphere that King's Field is known for. Specific areas like the West Shore will have all new flora and be more populated (more houses, npcs, ect) and luminous. This of course means larger drawn distances, which will unfortunately result in a rather annoying graphical glitch SOM creates when in large open environments, where map pieces on the sides of the screen are cut off to conserve memory. I will however try my best to make this problem as least-noticeable as possible (this may mean having to play the game in 4:3 standard resolution).
Lastly, I'll be using music made by a Youtuber known as Jacob Lake (with his permission of course). He makes some very unique King's Field-inspired music that will be perfect for this project. (His channel can be found here): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGYuLbj...-PXAqyQj0Q
Let me know what you all think, does this sound like a game you would play?
PS: If anyone happens to have the maps from King's Field 2, they will help me lots!
December, 20 years ago From Software released probably one of my all time favorite games, King's Field... I have very little expectation of From Software realizing this, and actually releasing something to commemorate the date, so it's up to the fans I guess. Hey, I have free time to burn!
For this very special day, I've got something planned which will probably be one of the bigger PS1 modding undertakings.
I'll be taking a break from SoM 2.0 while I do this, but it should only take a month if I can do the textures with my very limited skills.
The eventual product will be a windows launcher, which'll have some fancy graphics and a pre-configured PS1 emulator, with configurations to get the games working perfectly, and an inbuilt PS1 image patching tool to install the mods. It'll be released ON THE DAY KF-Japan was first released.
First on the list is KF-Japan,
Some special thanks go to HwitVlf, for (I'm pretty sure this was him) translating the original KF-Japan into English, so I can mess with it without being confused. And even more for creating KFTool and giving a basic instruction on how to replace/add files to PS1 isos, without messing them up.
NOTICE: I'd like to ask HwitVlf a few questions should he see this, regarding to a pretty big idea I had with PS1 modding, caused by a very nice error I did replacing TIMs...
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