Proper size and orientation from Blender to SoM

[Holy_Diver]

I made a note the other day to fix that scrollbar in your screenshot. There's also a Daylight Saving Time problem with the update tool. (It will just erroneously prompt to update itself once a year.)

This forum has a PM system, but I would rather you use this thread. It's certain more convenient for me, but it's good for passersby to see your activity.

I ran it 'as administrator' and the game ran great!

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe you have Direct3D disabled on your user account. Look at the "dxdiag" tool.

I have unzipped both the Default and Neutral collections and copied them over into their respective areas. I assumed this was what I needed to do as it gives me English everywhere except for that strange DX error above.

They don't have to be unzipped, and will probably load faster if not. If the tool file names have .zip in them, they are using the ZIP files. Which is what you should do unless you're doing work on the language pack.

If you "copied" them, then you probably broke something, and need to start over from scratch. It's all automated. If you are doing something drastic you're doing it wrong. It's designed to be user-friendly.

I still have some tweaking to get the language stuff working. The menu's in my project were showing up in Japanese, but the tools were in English.

The starting Ex.ini file is sourced from the language package. So you probably made your project with a Japanese language package.

I kept opening the diagnostic overlay, and switching into VR mode. haha

The project has some functions bound to spare buttons. You should be playing with the analog sticks and shoulder buttons.


P.S. Do you know why your OK box looks like that under Windows 10? Are you using the High Contrast mode? Keep me up-to-date on your problems. For Windows 10 the setup process should be effortless. Tell me if you have a special version of Windows 10 or anything that might be unusual about your computer.

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: Instead of "starting over" one option is to use SVN Revert (Tortoise SVN) or delete the project folder if you did something there.

Did you run SETUP.BAT and START.BAT as Administrator? Are you running "Moonlight Sword" (SOM_EX.exe) via the Start Menu?

The install registry location is at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\FROMSOFTWARE\SOM\INSTALL but maybe if you installed SOM now or originally as Administrator you might have another section under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. I don't know.

There's nothing wrong with SOM, so you cannot solve your problems by trying to change SOM. What's wrong is your computer, so you should focus on that.

With Microsoft's "regedit" tool, if you find an HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\FROMSOFTWARE key, delete that. I don't know what the effects would be if so.

P.S. You should never use Run As Administrator with software. Software shouldn't require it unless it's broken. You need to understand when you do that you are using a different user account. It's like if you logged out of Windows and logged in as a new user account. Nowadays Windows does a thing where the screen goes black and you have to agree to a prompt, that should make it never necessary to do things with Administrator.

EDITED: A corollary to this is don't manually put files in your Program Files folder. I tried to do that once with SOM and it didn't work. It's just an idea, in case that's what you've done to yourself. I would put SOM in my C:\Users\Michael\ home folder.

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: As an experiment. it's pretty weird if you cannot run that KF2 demo. Using its EXE file (which you must unless you associate the SOM file extension with SOM_EX.exe) you shouldn't have to use Administrator. You need to figure out why that is a problem for you. Unless Microsoft just rolled out a catastrophic Update I haven't installed there is something on your computer like antivirus software maybe that is interfering with your programs.

SOM can't run if it has other software making modifications to it, since that's pretty much what SOM_EX does. They would be stepping on each other's feet. It's pretty messed up that Windows lets other software infect applications without your consent, but that's pretty much what a lot of "enhancement" and "guardian" style commercial software does on Windows. The former kind is also a possibility. Like if you've installed something to enhance your games. I don't know. I wouldn't normally help anyone to install SOM, much less go to this length, but I know that right now no one is doing anything with it, and I'm the only one who is going to reply to SOM related business here. It's not really my place to troubleshoot this stuff, but it's a bind because there isn't a healthy user base either.

And not even the owner of this website has your interest at heart. So. That's life.

[theschap]

You were correct! I had disabled Hardware Acceleration in Directx 9.0c earlier to get models to render properly in the map editor when running the old install. It looks like you have that working in the newest version so no reason to toggle that back and forth anymore.

I have all my custom assets loading correctly from my project folder now.

The only problem now is that it's not loading the English text into the game for the menu. It sounds like I have to reinstall for that to work. 

[Holy_Diver]

Do you have categories in SOM_PRM that are Japanese? You can go into the English DATA language pack (ZIP) and find the Ex.ini template in there, and copy it into your project folder.

Like I said, if you make a game with Japanese as your language package for your tools, then you start out with a Japanese configuration for your project, which is default on SOM because it's Japanese software.

[Holy_Diver]

P.S. If you have a project, make a back-up, often. I just spotted a bug in the new layer system I could not reproduce, but if a bug happens on a map while you're editing it, and you save the map, then it can be baked into the map file.

I have to investigate this now. What happened in this case, is some elements on a different layer had crazy elevation values, that were really big (like 140) so are probably somehow getting filled with bad data, though it's unlikely random data. I have no idea what happened in this case, since it went away after I checked said layer, and then reloaded the previous, but it indicates there is a hole somewhere. Generally whenever you save the MAP file, if an error occurs in the middle of writing the file, it won't be salvageable.

If SOM had more users bugs would reveal themselves very quickly as soon as a new release is posted, but since it doesn't, it can be a slow-motion minefield march to stability. It's a good habit to regularly make backups, and keep old backups too. Setbacks may occur. You just have to roll with it, and rest easy in the idea that if you have to do something over, it will probably come out much better the second time around.

I want to encourage use of the layer system, because I believe it's key for making environments have depth. King's Field II is great for a lot of reasons, but its verticality is probably what distinguishes it from the others more than anything. SOM had a layer feature, just like it, that was kept out of the final product. The new system uses what parts of the layer code that remained in the program's code even after it was ripped out. (SOM's code must have had a compile-constant that fixed the layer count. Either it was unfinished or an executive decided to ax the feature for the first/only run SOM would see.)

[theschap]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll be sure to keep backups and make note of any bugs I run across.

I haven't really messed with the layers feature yet, but I'll be sure to incorporate it into my next test.

[theschap]

I finally got English language throughout the tools and in the game menus. I honestly found the language tool to be a little confusing given what I had to do to get things set up correctly.

When choosing the language packs, I wasn't entirely sure that I needed more than one. When I selected the 'Old English.zip' it checked both 'tool' and 'data' options, so I thought I was good to go. However, there isn't an 'Ex.ini' file in that pack so I either missed something or don't understand how things are linked up. Both are very possible.

In the end I added the "Default.zip", "Neutral.zip", and "Old English.zip" packs in the tool. I think copied the "Ex.ini" file from "../Default/data/my/prof" into my project folder, and all stages are in English.

I don't know if all of this is necessary, but I kept running into situations where one of the 3 SOM_MAIN, SOM_MAP, or som_db would be running in Japanese yet.

Like I said, if you make a game with Japanese as your language package for your tools, then you start out with a Japanese configuration for your project, which is default on SOM because it's Japanese software.

I think I messed up the order of operations somehow. If I had installed all 3 of those packs initially, more importantly the "Default.zip" then created the project I assume the "Ex.ini" file would have been moved for me.

In the end this process forced me to dig in a little deeper into the architecture than I would have otherwise so that's a plus. 

[Holy_Diver]

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.10.zip is patch for that layer problem. I'm really surprised I didn't run into that problem the entire time I was working on layers. (I won't bore you with the details. Short of it, is the bug is triggered by opening the Maps menu, since that reads in the headers of the MAP files.)

I'm always surprised by the funny things people do when faced with software menus, etc. Part of me wants to be sympathetic, but another part of me just sits back amazed and can't really see how to make things easier for these funny people, no offense.

The "Old English" pack has tripped up more than one person. I'm not sure why people install it, though it's kind of for people like yourself, who are migrating. In fact you might need to look into it if you have a project entrenched with the files here.

A tricky step for migrating projects is when SOM_PRM will want to convert your PR2 (or PRM?) files into the new PRO files. You may have already encountered this. That's what the Old English is for actually.

English Text Used By Old Games
==============================

This pack contains a likely incomplete selection of fan translated files that may aid any effort to up-convert older projects to a language neutral format.

If you only installed it because that sounds like the pack for you, then you have yourself to blame. But if you were trying up-convert your project, then maybe you were on the right track.

Making video games is hard. I hope you made a backup of your working project before venturing into switching over to a new system... it may take a few tries to salvage it.

I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but basically what you do with it, is you set your project to use it, really just for DATA. And you then open SOM_PRM, and it will use that DATA pack to generate your PRO files. The PRO files are identical to the old format, except they use the file name instead of the human-readable name in the file. That lets you make the name in the file multilingual. If you don't ever use the old SOM (which is kind of nuts) then you'd never encounter this problem. In a perfect world everyone uses the best software for their work.

The "Old English" pack sits alongside the "From Software" pack, and obviously those are both legacy support packs, that you'd want to avoid under normal circumstances.

The language menu is a little confusing by design because it's designed to be able to be used if you do not know the language. You notice it's symbolic. It's nonverbal. You have to keep your wits about you, and think intuitively.


P.S. How the PR2->PRO step works, is it builds a table of files/names and it looks for the names in your PARAM files and tries to match them to a file name in your DATA files. If you just straight copy the old files into your project you don't really need "Old English" but if you want to link your PARAM files back to the original From Software file names, then that's what it's for. I think you're probably better off just going into SOM_PRM and reassigning all of the profiles by hand.

The profiles in the install tree have a new categorization system that you don't (automatically) enjoy if you copy your old data folder. But I haven't done any work to cleanup the shoddy art work in From Software's object and character models, so the ones you have may be superior in some ways to the originals. I have found time to do significant work on the level geometry models. Those may be superior to ones in your old project.

[Holy_Diver]

When I grabbed that quote I noticed the undownloaded menu selections disabled the menu... which apparently is how I designed it, long ago. But that's obviously not good. So I've worked on a fix. That may have contributed to your confusion with the tool.

I also looked at the daylight savings time problem. As near as I can see, the CRT "stat" implementation on Windows (theschap tells me through PM they're a programmer) is a magical beast of some kind, that uses local time and DST to formulate its "time_t" number. I never imagined that. I don't know if POSIX does that... it says it's in UTC time. (https://metacpan.org/pod/Win32::UTCFileTime)

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=294.msg2713#msg2713