I'm feeling game to start work on a Galth Fee set. I'm a little embarrassed though because I can't find the original files Todd gave me (which he had somehow ripped from the game disc)
I have all the files I'd derived from those files but not the originals... and I've looked everywhere
None of my derivative files have UV information. For me the original UV info is a must before getting started. I think the files you gave me were .lwo. I'm assuming those are the files produced by the ripper... otherwise it's important to be sure at no point along the way UV information was added, ie. by some generic projection mapping.
I will start by compiling the models/textures for the originals in the .blend format. And I'm hoping Som will accept those as MDL files so I can just use Assimp's Blender support / x2mdl so I don't have to subject myself to the unofficial Meta (sequoia) -> Som toolchain.
If I can't use x2mdl I will leave the Som import to others until I can setup a replacement x2mdo app. I don't think anyone will want to use the original graphics in a game at this point, but we could make sure everything lines up at least.
Ultimately going the txr/mdo route might yield superior colour depth, but that can be a last step.
PS: Was "Seath's" armor the Merril Ur equivalent to the Galth Fee set? Or did he have another set of armor not represented in Som?
For some reason I was thinking about dithering, and I remembered that Som seems to want to have dithering. I double checked this, and it's true.
Now I don't think dithering was ever supported by ddraw/d3d in 32bpp modes. But in the 16bpp mode presumably there is supposed to be dithering. You may also notice in the various Objedit like tools there is dithering going on. The thing is apparently graphics hardware manufacturers at some point stopped supporting (hardware) dithering. Apparently this was bad for a lot of older 16bpp games because without dithering the rainbow banding effect is more plain to see and these games were never intended to be displayed without dithering, so that's a shame. The reason there is dithering in Objedit and friends is presumably because they are in software rendering mode.
I've added a variable that overrides Som's dither setting to turn off dithering for starters. The reason why is just because I figure games should be consistent across hardware and dithering really changes the look of the game and by default authors probably want their games to be consistent (even though there probably isn't many contemporary chips that implement dithering if any)
That said apparently dithering is how Som was meant to be seen... in 16bpp mode at least anyway. I know KF2 (Melanat) has dithering. In fact you all playing KF2 on emulators are not getting the full experience very likely because there probably is no dithering happening. I checked epsxe and my plugin was not dithering KF2 anyway.
Probably I was thinking about KF2's visuals when my mind found it's way to dithering this morning... speaking of which I completely forgot about my coffee...
I figure if one of you lot ever get an urge to make a game with the KF2 graphics it might look a lot better with a dithering effect for that matter. So I reckon I will try to implement some form of dithering in the D3D9 shaders... probably right before the gamma correction stuff.
The dithering I see in Objedit is not the same I think as what I plan to do (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering) but I think the kind of dithering I will try to achieve will be better in some ways because the DirectX dithering can cause problems when there are transparent pixels, because they get dithered with the non transparent ones and end up creating a kind of unnatural fog where every other pixel is transparent. It may in fact be Objedit is just dithering the textures, because otherwise I think there would be that kind of fog around every open edge of a polygon.
This (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering) kind of dithering just dithers the colour of each pixel depending on where it falls on the screen, which I'm pretty is how PSOne dithering works. In fact the PSOne dithering can be somewhat annoying on a non-standard-def-tube-display because the dithering mask is fixed even while moving so it seems like you're wearing a kind of veil. I think if I get that far probably the pattern can be swapped out whenever the view changes (kind of like how the stars change in KF2) to alleviate that.
EDITED: The dithering in Objedit seems to be something about how colorkey is implemented. It only happens within textures anyway. I don't know if it's better or worse than just knocking out the whole unfiltered (square) texel. I wonder what makes it work that way though.
Here (attached) is a new tool for working with .MDL files. It's called x2mdl basically in the spirit of the x2mdo tool that From' released. X2mdo converts .x files to .mdo files from what I understand, and that's what x2mdl does. However you can also try other types of files in place of .x. If that format includes all the features a MDL file requires and is supported by the Assimp library it will also work. If it doesn't include all of the features it will still probably net you a static graphic but might not be useful for animation etc.
As is I think you could get started making new doors and treasure chests etc, and even NPCs and monsters. However Som has two different kinds of animations, and only one kind is supported right now. With the supported kind you can make wooden puppets basically, like most of Som's NPCs but not make one piece rag doll puppets, slugs etc. The animation method you choose must also reflect that or the Assimp library will interpret the animations as the wrong kind and they won't be exportable (yet)
In this release textures will be converted to 16bit and be down sampled to 256x256 if necessary. Afaik as far as we know this is as good as any existing .MDL files, but it may be the format can do better. Just need to setup some experiments.
X2mdl only facilitates .mdl files... you will have to figure out the .prf files and others for yourselves. In some cases you can just overwrite the string of characters in the .prf file that stores the name of the mdo/mdl file. Edited: also I still have to develop another app for generating .cp files (more about that later...)
When you name your animations there are 3 ways x2mdl will recognize them. If the last letter is a closing parenthesis, x2mdl will look backwards for the first opening parenthesis, and if that is followed by the # character, the next characters must be the number, eg. Walking (#1) ...otherwise, the first character must be a number, eg. 1 ...otherwise the actual order of the animations will be used, so first animation is 0, the next is 1, and the next is 2, and so on. If your file format of choice does not let you name animations in any way, you will have to somehow make dummy animations to fill in the animation IDs you don't want/need.
Below is a list of animation IDs used by Som:
if(id<2)
{
switch(id)
{
case 0: set = "Idle (default)"; break;
case 1: set = "Walking (#1)"; break;
}
}
else if(anims<5) //! guessing object
{
switch(id)
{
case 4: set = "Opening (#4)"; break;
case 5: set = "Closing (#5)"; break;
}
}
else if(anims<12) //! guessing enemy
{
switch(id)
{
case 4: set = "Dying (#4)"; break;
case 6: set = "Evading (#6)"; break;
case 9: set = "Trigger (#9)"; break;
case 10: set = "Attack A (#10)"; break;
case 11: set = "Attack B (#11)"; break;
case 12: set = "Attack C (#12)"; break;
case 13: set = "Attack D (#13)"; break;
case 14: set = "Attack E (#14)"; break;
case 15: set = "Attack F (#15)"; break;
case 16: set = "Defending (#16)"; break;
case 20: set = "Hitting (#20)"; break;
}
}
else switch(id) //! guessing npc
{
case 2: set = "Hitting (#2)"; break;
case 3: set = "Dying (#3)"; break;
case 4: set = "To Left (#4)"; break;
case 5: set = "To Right (#5)"; break;
case 6: set = "To Face (#6)"; break;
case 16: set = "Seated (#16)"; break;
case 17: set = "Standing (#17)"; break;
case 18: set = "Hitting Seated (#18)"; break;
case 19: set = "Dying Seated (#19)"; break;
case 20: set = "To Left Seated (#20)"; break;
case 21: set = "To Right Seated (#21)"; break;
case 22: set = "To Face Seated (#22)"; break;
}
If you want to replace the arm, animation IDs 0, 1, and 2 are used for each swing animation, not sure which is which.
Control points are supported by x2mdl, but x2mdl won't generate the .cp file. In order to create a control point your format needs to support per vertex or per triangle colours. Setting the material won't do. Any triangle that is the same colour on all vertices and that colour is not pure white will be treated as a control point. I'm assuming pure white means the equivalent of no coloration... if that is not so for your format I will add an option to specify what is the neutral colour.
If your model has no control points, and you're impatient, then you can probably get it in game by using the wooden treasure chest's .cp file.
Beyond the scope of the .mdl file I don't really understand control points myself at this point. I'm assuming they are referenced by number in the .prf file. For example a control point at the tip of a sword damages the player when it touches the player during an attack and might be the point where a magic spell originates for example.
The way the program works is very simple at this point. And there are few frills in the case that something goes wrong. Just drop a file on top of it, and if it works it will make a file of the same name with .mdl appended to the end. Alternatively you can evoke the program via a command prompt and pass along the name of the input file as the only argument.
It's a standalone application, but requires Direct3D 9 and the D3DX9 libraries to be installed on the system. The kinds of external images supported are currently limited to the ones supported by the D3DX9 interfaces (.bmp, .dds, .dib, .hdr, .jpg, .pfm, .png, .ppm, and .tga)
Since Ipower tends to drop people's connections halfway through larger downloads, I decided to make a public access FTP folder on the server people can download the game and upload their own games to. As long as it doesnt become spammed somehow I will just keep access 100% open to that folder.
To log in, download any ftp program (I recommend filezilla) and use the following credentials:
For now the newest versions of DD will be kept there as well as any public demos you guys want to make available. Please try to keep the public folder clean and dont use it to deposit anything that is not SOM related. Since the folder is part of the overall ipower account and not part of the swordofmoonlight main domain, you wont be able to link to your files without using some sort of FTP program. So if you post about a file you uploaded, make sure you list the login information so people can get to your stuff to check it out.
Man I am bored of games. I just spent the last weekend going through every old game I had on my psp and I am pretty much out of good games that I am willing to play through.
I am offering money, I dunno $10 maybe? If someone will just bring out a good demo SOM game for me to play so that I have a shred of hope that something worth playing will come my way soon!
Something I really like about Som games is the 16bpp mode. I just love the posterized effect. It reminds me of the PSOne, but is also very psychedelic and has a painting like quality.
One of the best things about 16bpp mode is the items in the menu preview really come to life. They have a kind of shimmer as they spin around which I can only liken to a brushed metal pixel shader. I like 16bpp mode because everything seems so alive, morphing, and bursting with colour.
So I really freaked out today when my pet project lost its shimmer!! I don't know if something I did with my Som extensions made it disappear or what. I can't seem to get Som to go into 16bpp mode under DirectX7 to test it atm to see if I'm missing anything. So I immediately tested Dark Destiny and my testing project, and they had shimmer.... even better than anything I'd noticed before. So I did a lot of tests to no avail.
Without shimmer your items looks just static, like light is painted onto them. I think the shimmer I've been used to in the past was caused by have a very close fog distance. So the parts of the item closer to the eye would slip into the fog and that would cause a shimmer. I can detect a little bit of that, but it seems to be kind of lost right now. But Dark Destiny doesn't even have fog until way back... so I got to thinking and eventually realized its shimmer was caused by the map lights!!
The lamps you add to your map don't seem to effect "shimmer" of items. It's really a bug I think that the map lights would effect the items menu, though maybe not since under extreme lighting conditions you'd expect the same light to hit your items while examining them I suppose. But this is something I suggest authors consider taking advantage of.
First off, the ambient light will presumably change the general colour of your items in the preview (have not tested this to be sure) but it does not contribute to the shimmer effect. If you want serious shimmer, ditch fog and play with the directional lights. Until now I was of the mind the directional lights were the most ridiculous feature of the map editor. You can't actually setup directional lighting on your map with a global light unless the map is very simple and an entire side of it is occupied by the light source in question...
However you can give the environment a little bit of opalescence and three dimensionality by adding very faint directional lights... consciously not even perceivable. Because lets face it, with a perceivable directional light, if your map has anything like a cave, that totally ruins it (why is there a light outside and inside the cave and why does it always light the eastern walls of the cave for example) ...but best of all these lights will make your items really come to life, even very muted ones.
Bear in mind, every directional light you add is an extra light calculation for every vertex. And Som basically draws triangle lists, so make that every vertex of every triangle (at least until maybe I can get around to optimizing around this)
I think even one simple directional light might do the trick. To be honest in most maps in DD I did not realize there was any lighting going on. But every map seems to have some. And don't ask me what the "X/Y angles" mean. I don't actually have a clue.
In 32bpp mode the lighting of the items is less visually perceivable, but it's still worth while. With just an ambient light, there seems to be some lighting going on, but it's weird, like the light source is a satellite of the item always fixed in the same relation, and also not in an interesting position (symmetrical items will be symmetrically lit)
SO IF YOU TAKE NOTHING ELSE AWAY... add at least one subtle directional light to your maps today.
PS: On the Ex front I'd like to add an extension so you can setup a lighting arrangement just for the items preview. which would allow you to not sacrifice any performance under normal play. And surely I can set something up to let you adjust the lights in realtime in game until they're too your liking. For your maps also. And I think I would also like to sometime integrate the mouse with the item preview screen and add a key or two for adjusting the speed of the preview etc along with default settings.
I think I have a good theory as to why the graphics don't show up correctly in the editors.
Working with D3D9 I began to have doubts that the mipmap "autogen" feature was actually working. The roofs of the houses in DD were especially telling. So it turned out (under D3D9) autogen was not compatible with dynamic textures (at least with my drivers) which Som needs in order to interact with GDI which is what Som uses to copy its images into the DirectX textures.
So I let Som manage its own mipmaps and what I ended up with is the visual bug where most of the level appears invisible, which I'm sure plagues a lot of people, including myself the last time I tried to play a Som game on the XP machine I had originally been using to work with Som. I think this bug accounts probably for a lot of the instances where Som alone would just not work out for people. It turns out this bug pretty much happens whenever the DirectX 7 drivers let Som manage its own mipmaps. Many drivers when a mipmap surface is requested these days just return an error while silently managing mipmaps on behalf of the application. When the drivers do that Som seems to do fine in hardware mode.
But if Som goes and tries to make its own mipmaps something seems to go wrong, and they come back as all black images. SomEx can off course correct for this one way or another. Then in your game all the surfaces that sample a mipmap come back with an all black pixel (ie. transparent to Som)
Whether the original texture or a mipmap is sampled is based on the distance between the texels projected on screen which determines the mipmap level. So basically stuff further away gets a mipmap, but that can depend on the resolution of the texture also.
So in the map editor for example, since the view in either the piece preview window or the piece setup view the camera is always back a little ways the entire graphic is likely to be mipmapped or the front may not be but the back is, which pretty well describes what you see... on XP especially... Vista/7 may have some additional problems.
But anyway, the reason the editors always get stuck this way and the games don't is because I'm pretty sure the editors always display graphics in software mode so to be compatible with window modes on all computers.
And I'm pretty sure the reason I could use the editors without disabling my graphics acceleration on my XP computer was because I had either disabled or forced mipmapping. I think either way would fix the problem.
SO FOR THOSE OF YOU PAYING ATTENTION, you probably don't need to disable hardware acceleration in dxdiag if your advanced display settings section has an option to override mipmapping.
And the reason things probably work if you disable hardware acceleration is the software renderer appears to try to mimic the hardware onboard, so with it disabled there is no mipmapping support.
Hello everyone, I'm sort of semi-new (Tom of Diadem of Maunstraut fame helped me start into SoM before my computer went boom) to the whole development process that is creating games by SoM... it's really nice to meet you all and I do apologise if the things in this topic are somewhat hard to make sense of.
I presented a question to Tom a while back about the character potentially 'shapeshifting' to different monster types. He gave a few suggestions about making different versions of maps to represent the change of view as the creatures with stat and item changes, but I was wondering if any of you could give a fresh insight into the idea?
Another question I have is about is it possible to potentially make new monsters using the textures that are already on other monsters (such as the wood texture from the tree stalker monsters on a dragon or lizardman monster)?
With those questions out of the way, I suppose I should get to the main point of the topic which was the request... I'm a really huge fan of the King's Field equipment (I just have to say, the dark armour of King's Field 2 (Or King's Field 1 in the US and UK) was easily my favorite armour and the excellector was easily my favorite sword from King's Field 3), but SoM does not have any real models for items from these games (and it really doesn't look nice trying to remake Excellector and having to use the ice blade/dagger for looks) so I was wondering if I could request model downloads of the items from the King's Field games for those things that really do not exist in SoM already. If they do exist already, that's great (and I'd like to be pointed to them) but if they don't, I am hoping someone will take up the request as I'm not really very savvy in model editing (as you can likely guess). The reason for the request is I have a idea but I kind of need the models so that I can help distinguish for the player what each item truely is (as otherwise, they'd have a hard time telling the difference by looking that Excellector is not a Ice Blade or a Shard Sword)
thank you for this unusual SoM game. I have done all KF games and never thought of a puzzle one.I love the new look and feel of it you may have something on this.I have 7 solves,4 intell,10 magic,copper+steel key,1+2 displace.I have been running around lost as what to do next.I can't get past fire or pull arrow I see alot things above me.what have i missed I know you dont give a walkthrough to everyone. but a gentle kick in right direction would help thank you again for you time
