Proper size and orientation from Blender to SoM

[theschap]

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.

This phenomenon is the reason I have a day job. 

Once I gain some more familiarity with the tools and architecture I may be able to offer some suggestions to alleviate some of the confusion I ran into at least. I'm generally of the mind that relying on a user's own intuition is not always the best design philosophy. In my case, I was coming in with very little understanding of how the tools were laid out, and at different points of the troubleshooting process interpreted different meanings to the descriptive text, and how things were related to one another.

[theschap]

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.

I'll give it a look. :)

[Holy_Diver]

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.

If you read the main text it explains the situation:

Sword of Moonlight
KING'S FIELD Making Tool
World Language & Theme Pack Menu
================================

Step 1.
Press the big wide button below to begin downloading information about English language & theme packages.

Step 2.
Study the packages that should appear in the selection menu on the right just as soon as downloading completes.

Step 3.
There are two kinds of packages at this time indicated by the checklist in the top-right corner. There may be more by the time you are reading this.

Any items unchecked will appear in Japanese. In order to add a package, press the big wide button on the right. However first you may need to download/update it with the big wide button on the bottom.

Step 4.
When you are happy with your selections, press the big X in the top-right corner. Don't worry, if you are unhappy you can choose No.


Additional Instructions
=======================

The two buttons in the bottom-right corner let you add language/theme packs manually, from any location on your local network.

The ZIP button adds compressed packages. The other adds folders that are expected to be uncompressed packages.

To remove a package from your list, just make it blank. You can change the order in the same way. If two packages do the same thing, the package higher up in the list is used.

I think a tool like SOM you don't dive into lightly. It definitely needs some user guides to walk people through, but unfortunately that's something literally anyone can prepare, so I'm not able to do that kind of thing myself. I mean if I make a guide for one thing, then where does that stop? Usually user communities fill in that role for each other.

I'm scrambling just to cobble the bits and pieces together to make something work.

My major regret for this installer assistant is that I built in these long didactic explanations. I think it's nice, but it's pretty well impossible to translate. I can generally translate the tools into Japanese, but when it gets to natural text versus labels like that, I'm at a loss. The problem for me is everything is a hypothetical since as far as I know no one is using SOM for anything. People have no attention span, they just blow through town like the wind at most, aside from Verdite there is just Tom who made a bunch of admirable games. But that's pretty much the history of SOM apart from myself.

EDITED: Tom's screen name is... actually I think it may be slough spelled backward: Hguols. I usually use people's screen names, but Tom's published under Tom Eversole. Verdite is Ben Connolly. One of there demos that is a damn near feature length game is here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?board=5.0) with SOM_EX. It's a good demonstration of what SOM is really capable of: https://www.facebook.com/pg/moratheia/photos/?ref=page_internal

[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.)

 

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.10.zip is a brand new patch, since we spoke on the subject. It fixes another problem I did to myself, and also the Copy/Paste system for map slots.

I just discovered the Copy/Paste thing earlier today. I don't use SOM_MAP enough. At the same time discovered that I can't get the elevation assignment button (=) to work with the multi-selection function. It sets the tiles to 0.0 instead of the value...

Maybe I'm crazy but I can't believe I've been using SOM for years and only just noticed this. If anyone knows this is a problem with the original software I'd appreciate it. It's something I'm going to work on for the new release I'm presently preparing.

(Multi-selection is accomplished by holding down Shift and click-dragging the mouse over a region of tiles.)


EDITED: I reuploaded the patch (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=294.msg2720#msg2720) with a multi-select fix and taste test of the new SoftMSM system.