Today I invented a perfect anti-aliasing technique that I hadn’t envisioned. I don’t know that it’s ever been used or independently invented before. Often times I feel like my life is movie.

The technique, like the others I’ve pioneered for Sword of Moonlight during the recent months is unorthodox. It was born out of getting just right up to the finish line and wanting like mad to make it across. It’s completely “free”. Both in the sense that it doesn’t impact performance at all, literally, and is ready for all GPU based integrated graphics or whatever. And in the sense that I am certainly not interested in holding it to my chest. To the contrary I wonder how to get it out to the masses?

I’m shifting my focus with Sword of Moonlight to being all about this technique. The Moratheia project looks like a movie. Maybe I’m lovesick, but it looks like Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. I’m not sure why, something about the author’s artwork to be certain, but it’s never looked fully real before like it does now. I caught that film recently on Netflix so it’s fresh in my mind.

There is really very little to this. Except it imposes some restrictions, and the map editor tool chain may require special attention. For the map geometry cracks are everywhere, it feels like a PlayStation game, like classic King’s Field, but that’s no excuse. To use this technique the vertices must be manipulated in “homogeneous space” so there has to be common vertices everywhere; I haven’t seen any non-map tile elements that don’t adhere to this.

There are also some trouble with decal like polygons. I will probably see about making everything that isn’t map geometry decal like, but I don’t know if that is universally supported by hardware, and I don’t know how to implement it in a shader. This has to do with manipulating the vertices again. It doesn’t change the depth at the vertex, but it does inside the polygon.

There is a lot to attend to. This movie like quality is so impressive, it feels like it could be a clean break from the history of video games into something fresh and exciting (sometimes my life doesn’t feel like a movie. Sometimes it feels like one of those games, where you are all alone, the center of the universe, but no one else your equal nor peer. That much is a damn shame.)