SomEx instructions thread for Rathmor demo

#6
(2012-12-31, 04:17 AM)dmpdesign link Wrote: I am in some agreement about the healing...I am not a fan of downing 10 sea herbs to get to full health. ‎  But i also realize this a very early demo and it does showcase your customs. ‎  Holy.. the issue i experience with menu/ picking up items is SOMs inherent need to queue keypresses so since the cancwl nutton is the same as the interact button i often find picking up items a pain. ‎  Perhaps a keypress debounce could be added?

Ex already divides SOM up into input "contexts" to prevent this sort of thing. So if you are experiencing issues its because of this bug that happens when exiting from a menu into "the field". This kind of thing sometimes occurs when exiting the main menu, suggesting that the bug is in play there too. It seems to happen because SOM is schizophrenic about its different states of play, in other words sometimes it is simultaneously in the menus and not in the menus, and when that causes noticeable interference it manifests in this way. Anyway if you leave a menu and the exit button makes the player do something in the field (with Ex) it's because SOM can't make up its mind what it is doing. And if the movement is very pronounced, it's because several frames went down the memory hole during the long pause that you likely experienced.

It's the last serious bug doing visible harm, and unfortunately its far more vexing than any of SOM's other bugs as there is no obvious way to attack it. It's like the last boss of SOM game mode wise. I'm confident that it will be bested but to be honest I can't in good conscience encourage people to make games with SOM until this bug is definitively out of the picture (if you just want to play with SOM of course that's another story)

Either way there will eventually be an emulator that won't be plagued by any of SOM's bugs, and I inadvertently spent a large part of this year working on that. I hadn't planned on it, but as soon as I started programming a model viewer I knew I didn't have the time or patience to maintain two separate ways of displaying SOM's models on a desktop. And displays are like wallpaper... in that it doesn't make sense to put up wallpaper if there is no house, so that's most of the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2012. I only started working on SomEx.dll again because I was inspired by the control work I did for that and wanted to get SomEx.dll's control stuff finalized while controls were still in my mind (and it occurred to me how an extension added for what later turned out to be an Ex bug affecting Hearts Collide could be used to do analog controls; which is of ‎  course essential to any 21st century game)

PS: The cancel button is the same as the Menu button but its not the same as the Action button; the one used to pick up items. It's a good theory that when you hit the confirm button SOM picks the item up again before its been confirmed, but it doesn't explain why the input in general is non-responsive. The likely reason for that is SOM can't decide if its doing menu or field input, as if the input system is out of sync with the state/presentation system, probably because 2 different programmers worked on them and did not compare notes.

EDITED: I was forgetting that the Action/Menu button is configurable. I'm also not 100% sure that my assertions are in line with the default configuration. They probably are, but it may be based on a configuration which I once used, but I doubt that because I never use the first few buttons for Menu/Action because they are the face buttons on the PS2 controller I use. Anyway I don't suppose that changes the prescription, but it's a technical correction.
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Re: Rathmor Demo SomEx instructions thread - by HolyDiver - 2012-12-31, 07:56 AM



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