This is the official Trismegistus with Ex 0.9 download thread

[Holy_Diver]

I am uploading/submitting the final Ex 0.9 makeover for Trismegistus download for testing/approval purposes here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/Trismegistus%20Ex_0_9.7z) eta a little less than an hour (now 30mins) if a re-upload is not in order.

Because my main machine is in the tank I've lost all my convenient access codes and such, including the ones for this website's FTP, so that's why the odd address. I chose also to go ahead and use the 7z compression format which I hope everyone is familiar with (the filesize was 20% or better smaller)

I'm assuming if this version is able to make its way to the Trismegistus homepage Todd will probably wanna rifle thru it to make it more acceptable website wise. A little readme might not hurt either. Let's see if we can collect any questions first.

As an added bonus... a final detectable bug I'd not made any inroads with seems to have mysteriously gone away last time I fired up the game. I don't recall changing a damn thing though, so it might come back. Basically under XP with the Windows Classic theme (maybe the XP theme as well) after the intro screens or upon loading the first map the window title in the caption bar would appear to be missing, even though it's still really there, just drawn over with the background colour for no reason. If you would do anything to make it refresh either fully or partially it would. The bug would only happen with Trismegistus. Anyway, if you see anything like that please let me know. Otherwise any obvious problems are new to me and I'd appreciate hearing about whatever you might find.

I've really been pushing myself to my limits to wrap this up. This release is for gaming rigs only more or less. That is I can only recommend playing it if you've Shader Model 2.0 support or better. Also can only endorse flawless behavior in D3D9 mode. I hope to release some patches over the next couple months targeting lower profile configurations. And also intend to setup a patch which should be identical to the current download only with basic amenities like window and mouse support and all possible bug fixes (all except for the lighting fix hopefully)

I also plan on improving the translation file and correcting some stuff to do with the translation hosting webpages. When that is ready you can just download the translation file and drop it into the lang folder where it belongs if you want.

I think if your computer plays Som games well enough this version should probably play well for you also. If not I'd like to hear about your experiences. It may be playing outside of exclusive fullscreen mode (ie. in window mode) might be intrinsically slower. You don't have that option with Som. I think fullscreen mode should work with Ex though I did not test it one last time before rolling this release. I will explain how to put it into true fullscreen mode (by editing the Ex.ini file) at a later time if necessary.

PS: Tomorrow I wanna add a screenshot of the fonts which you can use to let me know if the fonts are working correctly for you or not. I'd like to know anyway. Please try to try the download out asap, thanks

[Holy_Diver]

Here is a screenshot you can compare to your own game to see if the fonts are working correctly for you. The ampersand (&) is pretty distinctive (in Direct3D HAL & TNL) for the ascii font (Egyptian) ... I mainly wanna be sure the font is being found in the font folder. I dunno why it shouldn't be, but Windows tends to be pretty finicky in the font dept.

There is a fairly elaborate way to build hybrid fonts that looks like this (from Trismegistus Ex.ini) below...

system_fonts_to_use = 120% 0 Egyptian505 BT U+0000-007F

That says to use the Egyptian font for ascii Unicode ranges basically. SomEx always adds MS Mincho (or whatever it finds in the som_rt.exe image) to the end of the list. So it's like the default.

MS Mincho ascii does not look good next to its own pretty quotation marks etc, which don't seem to be up to the standards of the rest of MS Mincho (since they're not part of the 932 codepage presumably)

I've also noticed the cursor not behaving as it should. I don't know if that's because of XP or because the processor(s) on this machine can never seem to keep up with anything. I don't think I had any probs with Vista (though some last minute changes may've affected some things minorly) so I'm hesitant to make any changes until I can get my Vista (7) machine back up. One good idea I think I just had is to do as much as possible to run Ex's utility thread on a separate CPU core. I'd wondered if there was anyway to leverage multi-core CPUs in the past and couldn't come up with anything major. But putting the cursor and stuff thread on another core whenever possible is probably not a bad idea.

[Holy_Diver]

Both Todd (DMPDesign) and Ben (Verdite) ... please let me know guys how you'd like to be addressed ... have informed me that on their computers it appears Trismegistus.exe I think is connecting to the internet.

A) Nothing Ex does connects to the internet.

B) If the game is running Trismegistus.exe is actually in a catatonic state until Trismegistus.bin close. Specifically it calls WaitForSingleObject() which does not return until Trismegistus.bin is no more.

Therefore your computers must be infected by a virus, which has loaded itself into Trismegistus.exe's address space, created it's own execution thread, and is using that thread to impersonate Trismegistus.exe while it connects to the internet. This is all very bad behavior, and if you find out what software is responsible for this were I you I'd get it off my system asap.

Despite the utter lack of ethics, probably the software on your system that is causing this to happen likes to call itself "anti-virus" software. Ironic since it behaves exactly like a virus (at least virus is in the name I guess)

Last night while doing some research I came across some software which includes a disclaimer on its download page here (http://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php) which probably applies to Ex as well.

What's really horrible here is not that whatever software doing this thinks Ex might be a virus. But that it apparently does not put up a dialog box asking you if you think Ex is cool or not, and it does its dirty business from within Ex, making it look like Ex is doing it. Most likely its trying to look up Trismegistus.exe on its corporate website. Probably you have two different pieces of software at odds with one another. Like a software firewall and an anti-virus regime stepping on each others' toes. Either way it's unacceptable behavior.

Personally I don't trust anti-virus corporations. I suspect they are responsible for 99% of the viruses on the internet. All you need to protect yourself from viruses is education. If you have a sweet tooth for warez downloaded from shady places or by shady means quarantine that stuff on another computer and be thankful the viruses on it can't infect people. Anti-virus software can never truly protect computers you rely upon for work and security from your own stupidity and the shear amount of human evil that is out there

PS: For the record, Trismegistus.exe makes use of the following Microsoft APIs which are probably arrows in every virus' quiver. And are for sure arrows in the quiver of whatever software is actually connecting to the internet on your computers.

ReadProcessMemory
WriteProcessMemory
VirtualProtectEx
CreateRemoteThread

SomEx.dll uses all but CreateRemoteThread.

These are official Microsoft APIs which can of course be used for good or evil. They are the only way to do things with software where recompiling the software is not an option on the table. Hence not something Ex can do without.

[Holy_Diver]

Do you happen to have zone alarm on any of your test machines to see if it does with yours?

I'm not really concerned about it, I am guessing its just something stupid on my machine.

Can you please reply about this in the Trismegistus forum post. I just duplicated it there for stickiness sake until I can find time to clean it up (the other thread is locked so like only you and I can post in it)

I would definitely appreciate it if you guys could put your heads together and figure out what your machines have in common. I'm sure zone alarm (soft firewall I think) is detecting the outgoing activity, but there is some other software on your computer which is actually causing it. I happen to have a spare computer atm which can probably run the game enough to cause this to happen / with zonealarm. If something did happen it would mean Windows itself is connecting for some reason... if so, presumably to build a database of applications using certain APIs. You might see where the connection is going to... the server would probably give it away wherever it is. I very seriously doubt it's Microsoft's doing, so most likely setting up a test on my part would be a waste of my time.

I'd prefer if you guys could figure this out. I'm pretty disgruntled with the fact whatever is doing it does not distinguish itself from the application in question.

[Holy_Diver]

Anyone know if the 1 (player level) in the status panes does anything? At first I assumed it went up with each piece of the Trismegistus, but I'm not sure that would be a very simple scenario to setup. So now I'm inclined to think Tom just couldn't remove it without knocking out something else or something. I'm pretty sure it's there in the original game anyway.

I'm thinking probably this version should get rid of it, but I don't want to do anything destructive

[Verdite]

I'm going to test you're new tris ex, i have never used a 7z file before though...

[Verdite]

When will you be increasing the resolution for ex use?

[Holy_Diver]

When will you be increasing the resolution for ex use?

I don't know what this means. The resolutions available to you are dictated by your display adapter. They are the same as the ones you pick from when choosing your desktop resolutions.

[Holy_Diver]

I'm going to test you're new tris ex, i have never used a 7z file before though...

7z is 7zip. It's been replacing .zip as the compression standard from some time now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z)

Which version tried to connect to the internet for you? The beta I shared a while back? Or did you just hear about that from Todd?

[Holy_Diver]

Som is just damn slow on this computer I'm using lately. Unplayable for anything but testing. Even in simple maps.

I'm pretty convinced whatever the prob is it's entirely isolated to the CPU. Do we know what the minimum CPU specs are?

The website says Pentium II(R)300MHz ... I'm running 1.6Ghz dual-core ... what gives?!

Kinda depressing. There's gotta be something pathological going on. Whenever I move an inch the framerate drops radically.

It's not Ex related. I might try to see if there is someway to profile it...