'Mytrosia' and 'Fallen By The Way' News

[Madison Lastrega]

New progress forest pic..........Ahh the colors of fall...... I built a new oak set consisting of 4 colors to add more depth to my forest scenes,,,,,,, Mytrosia is made up of 8 islands...... so the main theme of this game is mostly forest scenes , beach scenes lots of water and 8 huge underground dungeons........ Not happy with my floor yet but it is a work in progress......... *wondering if I am talking to myself*........ML

[Madison Lastrega]

I am............I am talking to myself............ All alone in SoM.com..........tis sad.........

[dmpdesign]

Been outta town for 8 days, will be home tonight.

I just got caught up on all the posts since ive been unavailable.

ML...I am sad about FBTW but I totally understand and support your decision. ‎  When I heard you were contemplating 60 maps in SOM I figured it was only a matter of time before some limitation frustrated you to the point of stopping SOM, quite honestly, I expected it earlier than 7 months in.

I am glad you are going to produce mytrosia, and am looking forward to it.

A few words of caution, and take them however you want. ‎  Working with another engine with far less limitations is going to saddle you with a project that is likely going to be far greater than one person can handle, especially if you are truly considering a 1 year project time. ‎  A 20 map SOM game with only 50% customs would take any normal person nigh a year to complete.

Find a reliable programmer. ‎  I can't stress this enough. ‎  Countless, and I mean likely tens of thousands of would be cool games never see release simply because the indie groups that are producing them lose a lead programmer and can't go on without them. ‎  Source code is not an easy thing to follow, especially if the programmer you have is in the 'learning' stage...i.e. a college student. ‎  They will do things half-assed simply because they don't know better, and might leave no comment lines in the source, thus making it nearly impossible for anyone else to pick up where they left off. ‎  Be 100% sure the programmer you have is in it for the long haul, and don't expect to randomly pick up a new 'college nerd' at the drop of a hat that can pick up where another programmer bails. ‎  Just be careful...with this new engine your project just got a lot more in depth, and custom code is pretty much impossible for a community (such as this one) to help fix up if it goes south.

Ill type more when i get back, gotta go finish packing.

[Holy_Diver]

I look forward to the Som game and want to reiterate Todd's warnings / encourage you to not be discouraged if your Crystal Space adventure turns into a gameless learning experience.

About comments and code. A really good programmer knows how to write code that is self documenting (needs no comments 99% of the time) unfortunately most programmers are tragically taught to program in ways which were probably originally devised in order to make code inscrutable for whatever covert logic.

In other words, explaining what every line of code is doing (the way kids are taught in school) in English is really an ill fit as the purpose of code itself is to be efficient and separate from any particular human language (which in this day and age of international opensource coding you can't always assume your fellow programmers will speak your language)

[Madison Lastrega]

Holy , I think I got a grasp of my programming, but thanks for your concern...... FBTW, and my crystal space project is a ways off...... I built the engine, got it working, tested the engine with a open source chess game, works great, know I have a ton to do , moving on........ For now Mytrosia is my main concern........ And I need you to help with one VERY important detail.... in mytrosia I want the beggining of the game to have the compass disabled until a compass item is found and used......... Now there are no conventioal ways to do this in SoM......... However I think your somEX (forgive me if I did not type that correctly) is the answer...... I have gave up on alot of "out-of-the-box" ideas , but it is realllllly important to get this feature working...... upon discussing it with Todd........ it might actually be written into the output game file what you need to do if you want to know is modify that flag in the system table......and see which parameter file changes in SOM, im guessing its system.dat......but if you can check the time stamp and verify,thats a step in the right direction.....if you can pinpoint which file changes, then you can run a program to compare the hex of the file when the flag is set to show compass on and show compass off........then youll know which hex needs modified.....Then find a way to change it in game, but there is no event for it. but there could be one that triggered a counter that you could monitor,and maybe based on that counter, cause it to change....... Do you think you can do that kind sir?? It would help the start of my game and make it more of a chalenge, as 3 maps of forset maze with no map or no compass, would be WHAT I need....... Now I gave up on all types of custom stuff , but I really need this to work, with your results in the past , I think you can do it......What do you say? will you please help me make an event to turn the compass on and off:) ............please let me know soon, for I don't have a lot of time to waste anymore, on out-the-box-ideas, that go nowhere............Thankx............. ML

[Verdite]

Joe! BLIMEY i love the forests! Q-q-quality! ‎ 

So mate, maybe we'l have to work together sometime? I think two heads are better than one and i can knock up models really easily.

Also how did you change the status / menu graphics? They look grand so they do.

[Holy_Diver]

I was just lambasting comments in code. Nothing personal.

A = A+5; //adding 5 to A so that A is now 5 more than it was

Probably the best way to disable the compass right now is to just keep it from being drawn by DirectX somehow. I don't recommend writing over the sys.dat file mid game anyway. SomEx doesn't modify the game files, that's kind of against its code of ethics. The only real challenge there is detecting for certain when Som is drawing the compass. Examining a counter is easy, another way to go (not ready yet) would be to look in the players inventory (saving the author a counter/event)

EDITED: I think probably the extension will take a memory address as its argument so it can work either way.

[Madison Lastrega]

So Holy..........Uhhhmmmm , is that yes we can make the effect work or errh not yet maybe? either way thanks for looking in to it..............Keep me informed.......... To Ben Thanks, I like when folks notice my labor:) ....And to answer your question....... in c:\programfiles\swordofmoonlight in the folder named 'Menu' all of your GUI's are stored......Back them up in a different folder, then modify them to your specs........ is easy and fun, be sure to overwrite in THE EXACT same postion for the spacings to be correct....... Here are the ones I made in full so you can see what I did:).............Happy Modeling.......ML

[Madison Lastrega]

Am I the only one who notices there is no attempt to file posts under appropriate topics in here? Or almost a perverse incentive program to do the exact opposite .........................

Do you always have to suck the fun out of this forum...... You think maybe more people would join and post if they had FUN and did not feel like they had to be under a microscope of what to talk about or where to talk about it ?

[dmpdesign]

Lol I have to wonder...was that posted under this topic instead of the other just for irony?