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) ‎ 

I ran into a problem today that has left me pretty damn disgusted with SOM for the time being.

I had the same map open in vmware as i did on my vista desktop, and i unknowingly created a new event in both sessions to this map. ‎  i then output one, and then the other and it corrupted my event file for that map.

now when i add events they are working in that map and some of them grab garbled data from other events that were working.

needless to say i lost my entire event file fora map that had probably 50 long events on it...so atm im going to try to recover it from an older file, but im still pretty disgusted about it.

The thing that worries me is whether i corrupted the map event file or the game database file that you output the events to.

more info on that after some testing, but please beware making the mistake i made...

I had an unusual idea about the SOM games that were made (English and Japanese games)

Any chance we can have a review and or walkthrough board so we can post our reviews/hints/guides of all the games that were made?

With the few games I've tried, It would be nice to leave a few tips or leave a review for other people to see.

I put a new temporary board here:

https://www.swordofmoonlight.com/bbs/ind...,13.0.html

Its a board under the "Kings Field Series" board. ‎  Visit it and test your KF knowledge!

At this point the forum doesnt really have enough traffic or enough SOM concurrent projects to warrant the need for instant communication among its members.

Someday things might change.

In the future, if we get more and more folks actively working on SOM projects I may consider adding an MIRC chat server function to the site.

The downtime for ipower yesterday is sort of what made me think of it. ‎  I got 3 emails from members asking why the site was down, if it was coming back up etc. ‎  I let them all know it was just ipower downtime and to chill, it would be back :P

Anyways, the concept of the IRC (internet relay chat for those not familiar with it) is basically a private chatroom that is always up and running where folks can come and go as they please. ‎  I would envision having one directly integrated into the site somehow, but hosted on a seperate server so when som.com goes down, the chat room does not.

What this would allow for is for anyone who wishes to sit on here and chat away with people about crap could do so...and any other som member could join in and see whats going on at any time. ‎  This would be specifically helpful for any group of people working on a singular project. ‎  For example, say I was working on a new game after DD, and several members were working on custom graphics, or music, or map events etc. ‎  We could set this chat up so they could all communicate and possibly use a centralized file on the ftp server to all be working from so they could each stay up to date with the project files and have them checked in as they modify them. ‎  Its something thats not necessary today, but in the future perhaps such a project would exist.

Some chat programs I have seen allow people to not be actively in the chat room, but when they log on get all the chat that happened while they were away. ‎  This would help someone that may not have been logged in get up to speed on anything they have missed.

Anyways, give me some feedback on this please...and Holy, would this be possible to integrate?