2009-09-06, 04:49 AM
I think eventually it won't be hard to work around the 1024 pieces limitation. I can program something that would let game makers select a custom 1024pc. repository for their project and so at least all of your 1024 pieces will be pieces that appear in your game. Well that is technically possible, but it would probably be saner to do things on a set by set basis, so it would be safe to say every set is used in your game though some pieces in the set might not be.
It probably wouldn't be difficult to let game designers hand tweak their sets in extreme cases, though they could probably do that without an automated tool anyway.
As for the -10 thing... don't let that scare you. It's not as bad as it sounds. Before I stopped really level editing my project (based on Tom's DoM) I got suckered into going over the Flame Lair a good bit. One of my obsessions included reworking his area where you jump off a cliff into a quarry like area (well it's a quarry like area now) ....anyway the cliff is much higher than 10 meters... maybe 20 meters, and could probably be as high as I wanted to be without it killing anything. But yeah, you do maybe need a sort of slope to make high things work, or a pyramid like tiering effect... but each tier need only be one piece wide and can be many meters high (not sure the technical requirement... probably approaching 20 meters??)?
There is a general problem with patching however, because objects and map pieces are lit by different algorithms/hardware the lighting tends to be pretty unnatural (if you're patching with something that looks like the area needing patching)
I think when I remake the entire som apparatus I will include a feature for generating pseudo pieces by combining map pieces. The only thing to be wary of however, being that every pseudo piece would count towards your 1024 pieces in the final output (that is if you want to be backwards compatible with the original som runtimes)
Finally this limitation can also be overcome I think by breaking your game up into multiple projects. I think it should be possible to hexedit the exe files so that many games can share the same save data, so that you can effectively link the games into one longer game. You could program events that would keep players from changing games when they're not supposed to (like swapping discs in a multi-disc game basically)
It probably wouldn't be difficult to let game designers hand tweak their sets in extreme cases, though they could probably do that without an automated tool anyway.
As for the -10 thing... don't let that scare you. It's not as bad as it sounds. Before I stopped really level editing my project (based on Tom's DoM) I got suckered into going over the Flame Lair a good bit. One of my obsessions included reworking his area where you jump off a cliff into a quarry like area (well it's a quarry like area now) ....anyway the cliff is much higher than 10 meters... maybe 20 meters, and could probably be as high as I wanted to be without it killing anything. But yeah, you do maybe need a sort of slope to make high things work, or a pyramid like tiering effect... but each tier need only be one piece wide and can be many meters high (not sure the technical requirement... probably approaching 20 meters??)?
There is a general problem with patching however, because objects and map pieces are lit by different algorithms/hardware the lighting tends to be pretty unnatural (if you're patching with something that looks like the area needing patching)
I think when I remake the entire som apparatus I will include a feature for generating pseudo pieces by combining map pieces. The only thing to be wary of however, being that every pseudo piece would count towards your 1024 pieces in the final output (that is if you want to be backwards compatible with the original som runtimes)
Finally this limitation can also be overcome I think by breaking your game up into multiple projects. I think it should be possible to hexedit the exe files so that many games can share the same save data, so that you can effectively link the games into one longer game. You could program events that would keep players from changing games when they're not supposed to (like swapping discs in a multi-disc game basically)