Author Topic: Old discussion and screenshots thread  (Read 37579 times)

Offline Holy_Diver

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #130 on: January 13, 2011, 11:41:43 pm »
Youre right ML, I just find it comical that someone who brings absolutely nothing but negativety to a forum can call someone else mean spirited.  I am, in fact, definitely trying to be mean in my post simply because I cannot stand the shit Holy posts, and as usual, if someone tries to act similarly to him he takes the "I am a good natured, positive person" reaction.

As far as I am concerned, and ever will be, I wish Holy had not found this forum and would leave, but thats just my opinion.

Anyways, as I know I cannot get the last word on this, I will end this with saying I don't plan to post any more about my dislike of him, because this is not really the place for it, this is a post about rathmor.

So Holy, go ahead and take your fake high road, telling me Im an ass and how wonderful and god like you are.  I will continue to anxiously await Ben and Joe's games with whatever they put in them as always, instead of telling them every idea they have is horrible and that if they don't incorporate Ex it will be a waste of everyone's time...blah blah blah, no one cares what you think....go fuck yourself.....blah blah blah

This is petty. I dunno what you expect of people but it's unfair to require others to meet you on this level. Dislike does not justify meanness. People have as much a right to be negative as anything else. That said you've misjudged me if you think I'm negative. I'm a deliriously positive person. Realism and honesty can seem negative though there is a distinction. None cause for guilt. Or persecution. If we were all afforded the luxury to wipe out everything which reminds us of ourselves there would be little left of society after all was deleted :rolleyes:

Anyway, yeah... Som really needs an "equal opportunity" forum. I thought we were doing something about that at some point :rainbow:
« Last Edit: January 14, 2011, 02:51:21 am by Holy Diver »

Offline Madison Lastrega

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #131 on: January 14, 2011, 01:58:00 am »
Spoilers sure......... Mytrosia , takes place on the planet Bangoria.......A planet very simular to  "Mother" Earth as the story progresses(ss).... Long ago on "Mother" all races lived in peace, and used magic for almost everything, the dominent race, called humas, unable to use magic relied on machines and thier own magic call "Science" as hundreds of years passed " science and machines caused all the other races to vanish....and magic became legend........ the humans never being satisfied with themselves, even began to destroy one another...... as weapons became more advanced , and science led to the reinvention of magic..... some humans even used thier science to bring the exstint races back, but mainly for labor and , the humans entertainment....... A band of elves called them selves " the dark Elves"..........  hated the humans for the misuse of power waged war on "Mother" the war led to the ultimate destruction of "Mother"..... during the final days rebels of all the races whom wanted peace between ALL races, launced a vessel pointed at the next star system....With Hope.......... They found a small planet with two lunar bodies, they named Bangoria, from the name of the elv that started the revolt against the dark elves........... they interaceted with the natives race, A primitive race of humaniods, and though out the years took them for stone age to bronze....... however the dark elves, became tyrants of the galaxy...... and found the lost colonys of Mother....... Fearing another repeat of the events on Mother the dark elves sought out to destroy Bangoria, 5 elders led a massive revolt and banished the dark elves to the first lunar body, the wepons ans magic stones used to defend the planet and keep the are held on the island of mytrosia......The island of peace........ a 100 years have passed and now a great plauge has taken over mytrosia,....... Four souls hold the key the plauge and must now risk breaking the seal of the dark to save the planet from this great plauge.......... Thats all for now......More to come:)     And Holy the software is here..this is the japanese one I used for simple testing, but almost any resource hacker will do, to tell where everything is........ and yes look at the code you can tell the value of BOTH allocted memory used AND VIDEO MEMORY used in the program, and with any resource hacker you can simply change the headers values, INCLUDING MOMORY:)  MAC programs have that feature built in to them...Windows programs you have to hack the EXE to change the allocated memory....... Anyway......once I translated the coments of the strings, I found out many things:) for better testing , DO not apply johns patch........... By the way that is how John translated SoM with a resourse hacker, PSS the one I am including here will aloow you to look at the string locations, and change EVERY piece of text in the game, just like John DID:)..............PSSS this program is japanese I have the english version if you need it too:)

Offline Holy_Diver

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #132 on: January 14, 2011, 02:43:30 am »
UPDATE: I have a hard time following your posts ML but still I am not able to tease much that makes sense (to me) out of them non-conventional structure aside. I just wanted to say in my prior post I meant to say decompile/decompilation... not disassemble/disassembly... I'm not sure which you were claiming to have achieved.

I'm kinda getting the impression you were possessed with monkeying with the apps that are not the the som_db.exe/som_rt.exe images. I gotta warn against that if so, because even if you get anywhere that way, it doesn't mean your output will be compatible with the executable files that ultimately have to run the game. You've said INI a few times though, and the only INI file I know of is the one that saves your in game options.

A) Resources hacking is only useful for the editors, and its really only cosmetic stuff. I suggested to John a few times he could really clean up his hexedited translations by using a resource editor. The final game doesn't have any resources.

B) The EXE images do include a field for reserved memory, but the number doesn't really matter, because if the program goes over the reserve more memory will be allocated for it. That might just cause a hickup, so some apps (few) might wanna reserve a fixed amount so they know this hickup will not occur. I have no idea what "video memory" might mean in that context. If it's not just an error message about the video card running low on onboard memory, it may be something GDI related. Like the size of the GDI canvas or something.

C) Yes there are some untranslated messages for the developers which are printed out to a debugger when attached. They are not programming comments as such. Just logs mainly. They are kind of annoying if you have really involved events because they will just flood the debugger like crazy in real-time. I could have them printed out to a console while using SomEx but I don't think there is would be any benefit in that.

I've been using Resedit. You will need something like that with Ex so you can add your game's icon to the launcher... which is generically called som_ex.exe.

You could also add English resources alongside all of the Japanese ones as a way to internationalize the editors. Or as many different languages as people want. It's not a very efficient way to internationalize stuff, but it's the only Microsoft way I know of. It might even be possible to change the charset of the text fields so you could use ANSI fonts/encodings other than 932 (Microsoft Shift_JIS) ... English is a subset of 932 but for other languages that might make a big diff.

Anyway if you don't talk about what you're up to while you're up to it, you kinda cut yourself off from input that might help you out / save you some trouble (I know this kinda stuff can be particularly frustrating)

EDITED: The "video memory" thing, if anything, sounds like a thowback to DOS days / probably part of the DOS header in PE structure. It may even be just the default size of the history in a console app in terms of a character grid.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2011, 08:10:13 am by Holy Diver »

Offline Madison Lastrega

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #133 on: January 14, 2011, 03:06:09 am »
Ok I wanted to increase the total size of my maps to 400x400, I also want to unlock the 250 items crap, 1024 Objects , Ect..Ect So I translated the JAPANESE som programs........ Like MAP.EXE I used a resorce hacker, I like PE Explorer best:) it shows resourses and thier hex locations as well and lets you REcomplile to make almost any (like you said Cosmetic) and NUMERICAL values.......Well All those stats like Items , Map part numbers, objects ect... ARE NUMERICAL VALUES........ most programs have an INI file that tells in what order the values are in, and thier location in the source file(S)...... From software ( I geuss in a form of of anti piracy , I suppose) killed that information, there for it is lost in a world of binary data.......... If you look at your SoM right using any editor you would probably see little question marks , Where as I see japanese ready to be read, So I did:) this is what I got..... Does this answer some of your questions?............. So sorta yeah were on the same page.......... and yes it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO frustrating, I mean I am working on it like ...Right now..............  Anywho Tired must sleep:)   

Offline Holy_Diver

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #134 on: January 14, 2011, 08:02:13 am »
Ok I wanted to increase the total size of my maps to 400x400, I also want to unlock the 250 items crap, 1024 Objects , Ect..Ect So I translated the JAPANESE som programs........ Like MAP.EXE I used a resorce hacker, I like PE Explorer best:) it shows resourses and thier hex locations as well and lets you REcomplile to make almost any (like you said Cosmetic) and NUMERICAL values.......Well All those stats like Items , Map part numbers, objects ect... ARE NUMERICAL VALUES........ most programs have an INI file that tells in what order the values are in, and thier location in the source file(S)...... From software ( I geuss in a form of of anti piracy , I suppose) killed that information, there for it is lost in a world of binary data.......... If you look at your SoM right using any editor you would probably see little question marks , Where as I see japanese ready to be read, So I did:) this is what I got..... Does this answer some of your questions?............. So sorta yeah were on the same page.......... and yes it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO frustrating, I mean I am working on it like ...Right now..............  Anywho Tired must sleep:)   

I can't remember how the Japanese text shows up in Resedit. I seem to recall Japanese but I may be wrong. It might make a diff if your system locale is Japanese so the ANSI codepage will be 932. I usually set my system locale to Japanese since I work with a number of Japanese stuff and English is a subset of 932. That said many apps may assume ascii or some latin codepage instead of ansi, but ansi is pretty standard way to work.

I actually don't know a whole lot about resources because it just happens I've never programmed an application for myself which required them. I've goobered with them before within the context of other peoples (usually opensource) apps, but don't have a working grasp of the stuff. I suspect I will have to do that at some point with Som stuff because I'm trying to do everything the Microsoft way more or less (except for glib / gettext so far... let's not go completely nuts)

Anyway, if you figure out what you're trying to do with the editors, which I can only encourage, because messing with the editors is not something I'm interested in... especially from the "resources" pov... Still I must warn you that those hard limits are almost definitely baked into the game.exe files. Though possibly not. Others I know are limited by the binary file formats themselves. The 250 item limit for example, I don't know about particularly, but it's very possible the limit is that because the indexes are 8 bit (0-255) and 250 just felt like a round number or something. If that's the case increasing the number might not help. Just as an example. Making the items 16bit would be a pretty impractical venture. I know a lot of indexes in things like the .prf files are 8bit. Though I recall when working with the magic .prf files there would usually be a second byte that would designate like a page, of which there was usually 4... so that could maybe be leveraged. You just never know how things will go. I know for example animation channels are limited to 7bits in .mdl files. Not that you'd probably ever need so many. But just an example (I guess like a Castlevania morning star with ~127 moving parts would use all of the channels)

Further offtopic: I was going to make a post. But it's late and anyway I felt like doing something completely different for a little while with Trismegistus finally out of my way. I started running some tests in the memory dept. It's a little early to say, but I'm pretty sure I've isolated the counters and in turn have a solid methodology for mapping out the memory in general. I will find out for sure tomorrow-ish. It looks like I will get to try out my plan for adding counter multiplication and division (and whatever else) support. That's top on my list in the counter dept. As is ailment / equipment / falling status read (at least) support.

PS: I can't say for certain but that string table looks like probably a general error message one provided by Microsoft by default.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2011, 08:08:47 am by Holy Diver »

Offline dmpdesign

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #135 on: January 14, 2011, 09:33:11 am »
Hey Ben, would you like me to peel these off topic posts into a new one for SOM development instead of rathmor screens?
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Offline Madison Lastrega

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #136 on: January 14, 2011, 11:14:30 am »
sorry guys I will post in the correct locations:)

Offline Verdite

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Re: Rathmor Screenshots and Discussion
« Reply #137 on: January 14, 2011, 02:27:47 pm »
Nah id rather they stayed here :D

I'm gonna move the screenshots to a new location, and just rename this topic 'discussion.'