Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Lewin's editor received an update to version 0.7 today. A critical bug that prevented editing the clear ups has been fixed, and now you can also see the clear ups graphically in the editor. As another "bonus" feature to this bugfix update, graphical placement of screen centering has also been added. The new version of the editor can as usual be found within the downloads section. You can discuss the editor and the new version over here.

Hi Litude,
I've finished my LIB Decoding document:
http://lewin.namsys.com.au/kam/downloads/Lewins-LIB-Decoding_version_1.0.doc
If you want to put the text on the main LIB decoding page as well, (not just as a document) then remove any bits that are irrelevant. (like the version number)
The percentage decoded is about 99%, as there are 6 bytes that I don't understand. (4 of these might just be a separator though)

I have also finished my scripting document: (based on my editor's help file)
http://lewin.namsys.com.au/kam/downloads/Lewins-Scripting-Information.chm
It is in the HTML help file format as that is easiest for me, and it can have multiple pages. If you'd like it in another format then let me know.
The reason I am publishing this is because there is no up to date, complete list of commands like in this document available on the mission decoding section of your website. (Nick's is ok, but poorly translated and with one or two mistakes)
I hope these help people,
Lewin.

Great job writing these documents Lewin! These seem to cover pretty much everything in a very clear way. At first I didn't really like the idea of having a chm document (can linux open chm's?), but it seems like you have really used up quite well the features that chm allow. They will be added in the next update.

By the way, there's this quite interesting byte I didn't see a mention about in your document. What I'm talking about is the character 7F hex (127 dec) value. I noticed when doing the text fixing for ELP4 that sometimes the game bugged and added an empty line in the middle of a message. This happened when a line break happened at the very edge of the message.
7F is essentially a blank character (looks like a space, but the words before and after the value are wrapped together) and IIRC it was also one pixel shorter than a normal space. The use it had was exactly to prevent the situations where the line break happened at the very end of the message and therefore an empty line appeared. It could be used to make the line slightly shorter (so the message doesn't get a line break at the very end of the message screen) or to bind two words into a group to make the line break occur slightly earlier.
Now I know there exists this | way to make a new line break. The problem with the | symbol is that it's close to impossible to use the | to format a message to make it look nice in all four different display resolutions.

Yup, Linux can open CHM files. There is a kchm program for KDE and probably something for Gnome. It's certainly no harder than opening docs. For that you need to download open office, over 100MB! The CHM reader is <1MB.
Oh, oops, I forgot to explain about the 7F's and |'s. I'll update it and post it here when I have the time. I was only thinking of the decoding side, and for some reason I forgot about that.
Are you saying that 7F is basically a non-breaking space? (like from in HTML) I never really worked it out, I should also update this in my LIB editor. (currently I just replace them with spaces, I never worked out what they are for)
About formatting messages: You only need to do this with briefings, in game messages auto format with new lines. (when I tested them they did, but maybe I'm wrong?)
The briefings are always on the same resolution, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Lewin.
P.S. When will the next update be? Do you have a lot of stuff planned?

They are definitely not the same as spaces. I'll need to dig up some screenshot to get my point better across though.
For the most of the time they thankfully do. But sometimes like I already mentioned, the line break happens at the very end of the message space and for whatever reason the game adds a completely empty line before continuing. As I already said, I'll try to dig up (or make a new) screenshot of this bug.
I'll try to get a minor update tomorrow as I'll be away for the weekend (there's your forehand warning ). It'll update kroms editor to the newest version, add your decoding docs, that new multiplayer map converter and then I'll need to see if I find something else to fix.

LOL!! I just found this piece of code in my LIB decoder's loading process:

Hi Litude,
Here's my updated decoding file:
http://lewin.namsys.com.au/kam/downloads/Lewins-LIB-Decoding_version_1.1.pdf
I changed the format to PDF, as I made it in Open Office and I wasn't sure if the tables would save ok. PDFs are easier to open too. If you'd still rather doc then that can be arranged.
I'd like mistakes reported, or if you know anything else.
Lewin.

Great! I do hate PDFs as they are so slow to open (do not mention Foxit Reader, it fails to read half of the PDF files out there), but I'm fine with adding it.

Well, if you dislike PDFs you can get a DOC file from here:
http://lewin.namsys.com.au/kam/downloads/Lewins-LIB-Decoding_version_1.1.doc
Before you upload it could you please make sure that the tables look and other stuff ok? (I made it in Open Office and I've no idea if it looks ok in MS Word)
That was the only reason why I chose PDF, so feel free to change it to DOC.
Lewin.
P.S. Foxit Reader works fine for me... Do you have the latest version? (the early releases were really bad)