Modding Expeditions (KF)

[Holy_Diver]

FYI I noticed today/yesterday that SOM seems to only ever use 128 vertices at a time, even though its "vertex buffers" are allocated for 4096 vertices. It never tries to fill the buffers up with more than one model chunk at a time. So I guess it only ever use 1/32nd of its buffer. In the past few days I've been retooling SomEx to fill the buffers until they cannot hold any more and then issue multiple drawing commands to see if this helps the OpenGL port I've been occupied with for past few months. (I've been looking at larger buffers and rotating multiple buffers too, but this tiny chunk size is more of a limiting factor perhaps.) Curiously 32*128 equals 4096, so it could be that the wrong number is chosen when allocating the buffers. Here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=321.msg3210#msg3210) I have more to add.

[Holy_Diver]

For a little more than a week I've been upgrading SOM_MAP's model viewers and have just published a demo that can be used to get the features working in SOM_MAP since this isn't the main focus of the new release I'm working on right now that won't be ready for a little while yet. This was more of side project.

In-depth explanation: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=327.msg3225#msg3225

[Holy_Diver]

I just did an unexpected few days of work that ended up making SOM_MAP's startup load time instantaneous (I stumbled on the one single thing that slowed it down) and now there's an impression of the map on the flat gray tile screens (see screenshot) and much better mouse input (perfecting my enhancements) and the "entry" ("Checkpoints") screen now works by inversion with just the left mouse button, so that the right can be used to drag (scroll) the view as you work (which is what all the screens do now, so you can say this screen was until now being neglected.)

In-depth explanation: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=327.msg3228#msg3228

[Pictured is someone's small test project called "Prison of Darkness" that I often use for tests since I don't have very many project sets to work with.]

[Holy_Diver]

I don't know, I feel more comfortable posting to this topic/thread than staking out a new one... but if anyone's reading this site, I think in this topic/thread we discussed "Misfit Model 3D" as a starting point for a 3D modeling system for SOM, and that just happened to be something I was thinking about after reviewing all the options, and that eventually came to pass, and now on my site in the latest version of SomEx all of SOM's 3D models are now converted to its dialect of MM3D (I call it Multimedia 3D) and the SOM_MAP enhancements from the previous post are included in this update as well. It was a lot of work, the most I've ever done in fact.

[Also today I published a patch with a system for inserting "comments" (notes/annotations) into SOM's events pictured below.]

[Holy_Diver]

Here's (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=330.0) news of using SOM without loading screens/hiccups if anyone is interested

EDITED: Here's a demo: https://swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k/devlog/375925/april-2022-demo-announcement

[Holy_Diver]

Recently I worked on putting these kinds of textures animations inside the MDO files themselves. This way the speed can be controlled and move on more than one axis (still limited to constant "translation") and attached to multiple polygon groups (not textures, but arbitrary groups.)