Happy Turkey Day 2010s

[dmpdesign]

I know I dont post as often as I did a year ago, but I wanted to wish everyone who still visits a happy thanksgiving!

I think we have a lot to be thankful for coming pretty soon as Verdite's project and Holydiver's extension are ramping up to make the SOM experience better than it ever has been.

Maybe we will get lucky and some folks like Madison/Darchangel/Asus etc will return with some progress on their games.

[Holy_Diver]

Yeah let's hope.

I spent virtually all of today peering into my monitor like a port hole in near freezing temperature decompressing after T-day... it was very Moby Dick, but anyway I was able to beat Som to the .ini file. All's left to do is reroute it thru the registry.

It was actually simple (though not altogether obvious) to inject SomEx into the top of the program (so it gets to go first) ... had that working since before Thanksgiving. The real trick turned out to be that the early injection does not get to run in the same thread. So the launcher had to somehow communicate the actual thread id to the other process. Interprocess communication is never simple but I wanted something lightweight/elegant. Anyway I got what I wanted. I think it's stable, but it's mighty particular... so let's just hope it doesn't become an Achilles' heel.

EDITED: I thought I could use the "environment" variables to communicate between the launcher and the game proper but turned out changes to the environment after the game had begun are not inherited and there was the catch-22 of not being able to set the thread ID in an environment variable because it's unknown until the game process is created (what a bitch) ... anyway thinking about how to manage the communication gave me some ideas about how to setup the Ex console, though ultimately it proved best to make that something that comes after the launcher detaches so to speak.

PS: So who's tried the new Trism download already?!

[AsusX2]

Ya, Happy TG. all My older Comps. are dead (Win 98 - Xp) So all I have is my Vista 64 sp2, and it wont run som at all. I do have parts but, It irks me beyond to have to switch up machenes to do som. I would be done by
now if not for that. I dont really have the money for vm software. so for now my project is on hold.

[Holy_Diver]

You probably don't need any money to get a VM solution up and running. If for instance your Vista 64 is not Home edition you can do the XP Mode thing. Dunno why MS is so stingy about that. Of course if you had some computers to play with setting up a machine with some Bittorrented images would not be a prob... or even with Linux you can probably VM Windows, and you might look into that free VM I think I encouraged someone else to try... VirtualBox or something.

I think eventually I'm going to fix the editors for Vista like I have for the game runtimes. I really don't know what the real prob could be there. But I have a feeling it would sort itself out pretty quickly if I started working on it. One thing I've been thinking about lately is an Ex console that launches along with the game (provided its enabled) and anyway I have a feeling once that is setup I'll run all of the Ex instances that share a common library file thru the same console... and I was thinking it would be nice to have all the editors linked into the same console and even connect them up over the internet eventually so a group of people could see the output to the console and chat across the console. Anyway... that will probably lead to some experiments with some of the editors.

I know if you disable or force on mipmapping things get a lot better, but not good enough to work out all of Vista's probs. I'm pretty sure all the probs would go away under XP with mipmapping overrided.

Anyway, try this (https://www.virtualbox.org/) before coming up with anymore excuses

[Holy_Diver]

Maybe we will get lucky and some folks like Madison/Darchangel/Asus etc will return with some progress on their games.

What about Mr. Johnny Park? If anyone knows how to get in touch with him, I think I'd like to use his Wicklow demo to setup an official Ex download which will be called Example. I was just going to do a skeleton with nothing playable, but I thought it might help some if people had something to play with, plus you could use it to experiment with different extensions right out of the box. That demo just seems nice and tight (and generic) enough to really do the trick.

I'm going to try to get Ex to a point where it can officially be called a 1.0 release. Right now I'm mopping up visual bugs that players would almost never find unless their hardware didn't meet the current Shader Model 2.0 requirement or they monkeyed with the Ex.ini file. I've put in all the work to support Shader Model 1.0 but I just can't get the so called legacy compiler to do anything. At some point anyway Microsoft decommissioned the 1.0 compiler, and now all 1.0 shaders get compiled as 2.0 by default, but that's worthless if you actually have 1.0 hardware. Anyway, unless I get a bite over in the Gamedev.net forums I've all but given up on that. I worry though if it ever does work the vs_1_x instruction limit might be a problem.

I think I wanna implement graphics in the fallback targets that are as close as possible to the quality graphics... and a maximize button on the window if possible. But I have a feeling this stuff will have to wait for a 1.1 release. If maximize works out it will just upscale the resolution in the options and do any dithering/tonemapping type effects over the final scaled up image. It will have to include the window decorations, but I will try to set it up so they get blacked out if the mouse is left in the game window for long enough. I'm also going to hold back on movie letterboxing/cropping until I hear from someone who needs it.

2.0 will come when I am able to fix as much as the tile/object disappearing stuff as possible. As for an official place to download the latest Ex builds, I'm going to have to setup a Subversion repository/browser for that which will include the latest source code as well.

I have everything perfected for Trismegistus. I'm just holding out so the SomEx.dll will be the official 1.0 one, and hopefully not require any 1.0.1 type fixes. The coolest part was working with the translation website (\<span> site blocked, contact your administrator/wp-print.php/ex/lang/Trismegistus/) I'd setup long ago so to get rid of all the text irrelevant to Tom's changes. I'd forgotten just how clever that site is