Well a few of you might know I had been trying to track down the author of several Youtube videos regarding an SOM game that was in development that basically no one here had heard of.
After a 2 month absence, the author contacted me tonight, and the conversation was not only interesting it was inspiring.
It turns out mr kilroyfx (i will leave his name undisclosed until he decides to join our boards) had likely been in contact with your friend and mine, one JDO whom I am assuming he got his copy of SOM with the translation from. It appears, however, not unlike a few of the folks that are active on these boards (Holy I am pointing right at you) he has a grasp for programming etc that far exceeds the limitations of SOM.
Within about a 2 hour conversation, I was honestly taken through a first person tour of the entire game he was making with SOM. He laid out programs he had created to inject pages of text straight into conversation boxes, advanced scripting programs that could automate creating events that moved objects in a very complicated manner in just a few seconds, then allow you to tweak settings and have it erase and recreate the event at the click of a button. He went on and on about the underlying story plot of the game, about the maps he had created and the whole concept of AI.
AI...and no I dont mean the generic junk you think of when you'll play my game, but I mean real world style interaction with npcs. Somehow through massive text injection coupled with constant random timer optimization, he had created npcs with personalities...that would interact differently with you dependant on how you played the game, and even how fast you clicked through their conversation! In other words, if an npc detected you were ignoring what they were saying just to creep through the dialogue quickly, they would change their mind about talking to you and walk off agitated. Holy shit?! Also he described how he created a dream world, dependant on what you had accomplished and what part of the game you were working on, that when you entered the dream, you would be whisked away to a dream like state, where you could possibly find answers to questions on the quest you were working on.
Anyways, sadly enough, mr kilroyfx feeling rather deflated that the only feedback he got on his videos was quite negative (this is fake, this looks non-kingsfieldlike etc etc) decided to move on from the project. It remains probably 30% complete, and we will likely never get to experience melanat as he was prepared to paint it. He has moved on to producing some games that I think everyone here may enjoy in the future, I will not spill the beans about any of it, but they will likely be available for the XBOX live arcade, and from just listening to his visions I have decided they will be games worth downloading when they come out.
It always pains me to see people start SOM and give up, especially so knowing he was as far into his game as he says. There may be a silver lining to this though...well there is for me and may be for the SOM community.
#1, he gave me the original animation for his melanat island model/video, so I can toss that crappy Bryce island I made and put something decent in my opening cinema.
#2, and more importantly, he is going to upload his project files as well as copies of the auto-it programs and some other various tools he was using to simplify and expand the functionality of SOM. I will of course promptly deliver the program files to Holy to make heads or tails of, but with his project space we will have access to a plethora of new models, map parts and an inside look to how he was using SOM in ways we may not have tried to accomplish things we may now think impossible with the tool. I figure at the very least it may help Holy in his efforts to rebuild SOM properly, and for a change let him delve into something created by someone on his level of programming.
So in short, hopefully the guy joins the forums and can help us out on things like breaking the animation coding for enemies and npcs (he dabbled in it a bit he said but wasnt 100% able to figure it all out). It would also be nice if we might be able to get him to finish his game, or move it to someone's able fingers (now Im pointing at Tom, cuz this guy's ideas were WAAAAY outside the box for his game concepts, and that my friend is your department).
