The Forum

I haven't coded in a while but figured I'd do a little project. I'm writing a kind of software toolbox for Soma. I started with dialog (.dlg) files and can now read, write and export them. But it's just an API and I haven't written a GUI.

Is there any need for a full blown dialog editor, or software tools of any kind?

Rather than just write any old thing, it would be good if I could release my files to help the community, so if there are specific tools people would like write them in here.

it would be nice if the tool could be used in conjuction with the soma.ini file to perhaps widen the current ui dialogs with the resolution entered in the ini file

That'd be possible. I can't guarantee it'd look great, because the images are pretty low quality and limited to 256 colours. Upscaling them might result in images that look bad, but I'll experiment to try it out.

The images look okay, but the area data in the dialog file doesn't dictate where to draw it on the screen. If the dialogs were anchored to the top or left, it'd be okay, but anchored to centre and bottom they extend off the edge of the screen.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to edit the display location without modifying the game client.

It looks like:

maybe even just the main UI stretched horizontally for screen width? altho that may require spell icons and potion icons to be stretched also

I can stretch the dialogs horizontally until the edge of the screen, but it would still have a gap on the left side.

can you increase the size of the text that comes at the top of the screen ? and / or the text size when people char on screen ?

That data's hard coded into the client. As far as I know, all the text in the game uses the same size. If the size were changed, it would be changed everywhere, meaning that text wouldn't fit into the text boxes. I don't think it would be possible to change the size in some places but not others.

ok thanks for the reply buddy

ahh, i thought it would center it. if the dialog could be stretched horizontally maybe finito could change it to center it properly also.

If Finito is up for changing the offsets to accommodate larger dialogs, I can supply the larger dialogs.

Good to see you around again Miser

The problem is when you have 800x600 res the bar would then be too long

So would need to make it so it changes based on res I think

thats the thing peace. it would stretch out the original only if res is higher.

800x600 load ui v1

anything above. check res from .ini run through tool to make ui v2 then load ui v2

"DIOS"Good to see you around again Miser

Cheers, it's been a while.