ifightdragons, the goals were:
1) to make a ROM hack that removed the game's stamina system
2) to make all available-at-the-time SoM ROM hacks compatible with each other
1 is long finished, though I occasionally make slight adjustments to it.
2 became a moving target and many more SoM hacks were released during the development of this project; hopefully I'll catch up someday.
There is and will be only one release variation, but this project uses a custom patcher that allows selecting which features you want enabled: literally all of them can be disabled, in which case, when you patch a vanilla ROM, you get the vanilla ROM back as output. If I do finally reach an intentional final release, it will include an IPS file with all settings at their defaults.
The current status is it's
perpetual beta: you could grab a version at any point and enjoy it, but if you came back in 3 months, there'd be a few more features. This doesn't mean it has bugs (it does occasionally, but they get discovered and fixed): I don't subscribe to that definition of beta, it simply means not final.
I keep a private to-do list, but many things on it will never be made, and some things I've been meaning to do aren't on the list. I work on this at my whim and fancy, usually while drinking a morning cup of coffee (I do this instead of a crossword or sudoku, etc.), and there currently isn't a solid final goal. I try not to post much about what's being worked on because I'd prefer to be able to scrap something if it sucks without it disappointing anyone who was anticipating it; if I do post about something before it's released it's because
I'm anticipating it (or it works and I'm just squashing bugs; quite a few features get held back from public release long after they're functional because of some obvious flaws I haven't dealt with).
Also, the more time spent writing here (or anywhere), the less time I actually spend ROM hacking: for example, this post will cost probably half of the time I spend today messing with SoM.
hmsong, as far as I know, visual differences in weapon range are mostly an optical illusion, and that they hit the same distance from an actor regardless of direction. For melee weapons, the animation doesn't necessarily perfectly match the collision area for the attack, and for ranged weapons, projectile height adds to the visual Y coordinate of the projectile, which makes them appear higher on the screen. There may be exceptions to this and testing or adjusting any of this is pretty annoying.
I added the diagonal columns to tbl_attacks[] (original NGI had only two columns per weapon) and I added them specifically for the sword (and then used them to improve an easy-to-miss-catch on a certain boomerang throw). The game's projectile system has no provisions for diagonally moving projectiles as far as I recall, so making projectiles move diagonally would probably require a lot of new code. I had briefly entertained the idea of having the bow shoot diagonally, but when I looked at the projectile code, it looked like it would require significant additional programming AND I was sick of the bow, having recently (at the time) dealt with a long series of bugs related to the rain of arrows.
I know there are some state consistency issues with saving and loading in vanilla, but never got around to dealing with them. Regarding Dispel Inn, I've always had a pretty good idea of what it'll take, it's just a pain in the butt that I don't want to work on; every time I've poked at it a little I've not enjoyed it.
Mr X,
