I've been working on a new game with SoM. I've got a couple levels done with full audio and music. Hope some here will want to try it. I am a kings field fanatic and have beat them all (w/o walkthroughs or cheats) and still cant get enough. I think you all will love the maps I have, for I have spent a lot of time on each one and and paid very close attention to detail. I just have to iron out the final storyline. Hope to have some sort of demo soon. Wish all of you well. Thanks!

anyone know where i can find some custom items from kings field 2 (US version)? I dont really understand how to make custom items yet but Im trying to learn, and i have no previous knowledge of graphic design or game making sooo yea, hopefully I can self teach myself.

So I'm currently working on intercepting (spoofing) SOM's device input. I haven't been able to interact with the controllers because of this weird crashing behavior that I can make neither heads nor tails of. However the keyboard is not a prob...

So it dawned on me... SOM's controller system we know is buggy configuration wise in at least three ways and practically unusable without shear perseverance. Fixing the builtin bugs seems problematic at best. And we know that SOM can't reliably even have access to all of the buttons/etc on your joypad.

So what I'm thinking, is we consider not using SOM for controller input at all. And instead we program our own controller interpreter, and translate from that into SOM's keyboard input. Think about it, you can do everything with the keyboard, so all we gotta do is use the controller to drive that. ‎ 

This is not tough at all to do. For now maybe we could alert the player to the alternative way via a readme or something. But eventually I don't think it would be too much trouble to hijack the controller setup menu completely and completely rearrange it for configuring around the new system.

This way we get a lot of interesting things. For example it would probably work fairly well to simulate analog control by sensing a lightly pressed analog stick and interpreting that into hitting the keyboard button like every other frame for a half speed and so on. This would give you finer control. It's also easy to detect when a menu is up (the only time som sends text really) and change up the keys for this so you don't accidentally cancel an unprompted message (like an NPC yelling at you) because you were just hitting one of the cancel buttons for some action. And in general I can't even control the KF1 remake that installs off the disc because the menu navigation buttons aren't available to my preferred controller setup.

If your controller has extra buttons you could even assign sequences to it, like use an item or change weapons to the select/start buttons.

Just out of curiosity I wanted to see now with 3 different domains registered under the SOM account just how much space was left...and considering I probably have nearly 100 gig of non-site related materials just being stored there I would say we are in no danger of overloading anytime soon.

Attached Files

  lol.bmp (Size: 63.54 KB / Downloads: 335)

First let me say GREAT SITE!! ‎  I'm new to all of this and have only been working with SOM for 5 days. ‎  I've figured out how to make the map, register objects, emimies armors, weapons ect... ‎  I want my game to be a multiple map game. ‎  How do I set up "warping to/from" each map?

This will probally be the first of many questions, as I haven't played with layering and setting doors/switches/counters/events yet. ‎  I'd like to first get my maps done and set all of the enemies/items/objects and NPC/Shops then worry about finishing touches like music and soud effects ect.

Thanks!

Chris

Here is another thing to look out for if you are going to create an event that turns an object.

I have a turn table object that is mounted on the wall of my game...each time you press it, the object moves 30 degrees.

Once you reach the event leaf that turns it to the 180 degree mark the object does a full 360 turn before it reaches the proper 180 degree setting.

Why this happens I have no idea, but I will do further testing to figure it out. ‎  I do know this, its not a problem in my event, its a bug. ‎  It may only affect objects that are being turned around the z-axis, but I will have to test further tonight to be sure.

Stay tuned!

The more and more I use this program, the closer I come to being 100% sure I won't make another KF game with it.

I just realized last night you cannot cast a support magic until you have an equipped magic. ‎  Its quite possible in my game to obtain the earth heal magic first ‎  (or if anyone wanted to try to remake KF2 for instance with light magic being usable at the start of the game) before you learn any magic that can be 'equipped' in the equipment menu.

Without a spell being equipped, your cast bar doesnt show up, thus you can never cast support magic.

Just an FYI to anyone making a game that this is yet another flaw in the growing list of SOM bugs!

its not the end of the world of course, but just another little 'feature' of the game engine that will further make any productions using it a bit less professional.

I have a question,

I have a feeling we'd be wiser to do all of this stuff as legally as possible. There are a few problems here. For one only John and "Masked Gamer" (wherever he's been) own legitimate copies of SOM afaik. So I'm wondering if we shouldn't publish games under the auspices of these particular copies of SOM. We could say we're passing John's copy around but I think that would void anything prior. To be honest I'd like John to post any license that comes with SOM for us for scrutiny. I just can't imagine a game software that makes standalone apps intended to be enjoyed by other people not coming with some kind of publishing rights to the owner.

Another consideration is usually it is understood/printed on Japanese imports "for use only in Japan", so what the hell that adds up to I'm really not sure. But these are grey areas worth considering I think.

Another reason for considering this is I think I now have the technical abilities to translate a SOM exe without modifying SOM's runtime files in any way. That is to say when we change the bytes in the exe we're technically in breach of Fromsoftware's copyright, because we've made a derivative copy of their product. So I think it would be more prudent to instead of using John's translated exe to use the original exe in the future, and instead use other means of translating the text in the game, like I've done by dropping a ddraw.dll file into the game folder. That's still not totally legitimate, but it's something an end user could do for themselves, like patching a rom. Of course they could patch the exe as well, but it's cleaner I think to not encourage changing the product. Adding files to a filetree I think is less offensive than modifying files.

I'm not suggesting there is any reason to be paranoid. I just think it looks better to play nice/by the rules.


PS: Again, I'm not saying everyone should own a copy of SOM. But it would be appropriate I think for each major game to credit a particular hard copy of SOM as proof of license or something. Once we get in trouble we can always go underground and do everything illegitimately~

Just to be sure no one misses this development, here is a thread announcing that I've in place a system that can rewrite SOM's text just before it's displayed in the game.

With this we can do a lot of things. For one we can use traditional internationalization methods (namely gettext) to make your games translatable into any language without modifying your game after it's produced. For already existing games like DoM/Trismegistus, you can enjoy this by just dropping some dlls and translation files into your game folder (I can implement this immediately btw)

Technically the system is just about as good as it will ever need to be. But I guess the rest of the work will be devising systems to make it easier and easier for everyone to take advantage of (eg. configuration)

Some examples of how I will be using it with my game project are...

A) I want to remove x1 from the inventory lists because it looks tacky and for most items there is only one of them in the game anyway.
B) I wanted all my stats to be single digits but once John worked out the stat formulas it was obvious this would never work. So I ended up multiply all my equip stats by 10, and now I can use the rewriter to chop of the 0s so they will look like single digits again.
C) I have shops setup that are really more like storage. So I had changed the Buy/Sell to be a more generic Take/Give dialog. But now I can recognize when the player is at a proper shop and change it back to Buy/Sell which seems obviously more appropriate.

So yeah, according to C, you can even change text based on what values are in your event counters on the fly. I have a feeling there will be many more instances where this will come in handy for me, and if you take the liberty to really open your mind about all the possibilities this will open up, you just might start to imagine how your own projects could take advantage of such a system.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to integrate this into your project, I will do what I can to help custom program whatever you need for you.

Can I get an amen

I don't have time to be bothered with this myself, but I'd like to encourage some of you guys to give this a shot:

https://www.backerstreet.com/decompiler/decompilers.htm

If any of you can convert SOM into readable C or C++ code, I think I could put this to a number of uses. I don't personally see much point in trying to rebuild SOM, but I think this could reveal the location of a number of valuable addresses in SOM's exe image, and might be useful for unraveling file formats if we can really make sense of what is going on. There are probably other advantages as well.

After we ever decompile the beasty we could go about assigning logical names to some of the variables involved as part of an ongoing effort (just in case anyone gets bored) ‎