I feel like there should be a lot to say about this, but I am perhaps too exhausted to say it. So, in brief, some months ago (I can’t recall how many) I began to notice some mysterious code within Sword of Moonlight, that I thought must indicate something was removed, to do with playing more than one level at a time. I thought it could be “layers” or a corridor between levels, or both of these things. I looked into it once or twice since. I even felt it may have been a load balancing system.

A month or so ago a person appeared who was working on figuring out the contents of King’s Field II’s disc for the PlayStation. Speaking with them got me to take a look myself, since it’s something I’ve been meaning to do. I wasn’t much help, but I did notice that there is two layers on each of the game’s zones. The other layer is interleaved with the first. I realized that’s the only place it could be, going by the size of the files that remained. That was a few weeks ago or more. Ever since then, I began work on making a layer system available to Sword of Moonlight, starting with its strange code from before.

Continued: Layer feature unearthed, now restored

A major release is now available. Also, the Windows 8/10 spellchecker service is enabled. PlayStation VR came a long way since the the last blog post, but is and will remain a demonstration.

This release adds an entire new dimension to Sword of Moonlight’s tools, by integrating new, full-featured profile editors into the main tools. The new editors replace the old model viewers, and while they remain a little rough around the edges owing to exhaustion, have a lot more character, since they have lighting, and pose characters, and also they use the same graphical pathway as the game player component, and so have access to all of the same visual effects, including the antialiasing extensions.

Continued: Things to come

Here’s an interesting stopgap release — it’s not what I’d planned, and it’s a demonstration first-and-foremost — but it’s also an official release, because it includes some of the best performance enhancements for Windows 7 and later Windows, and fixes some bugs that had arrived too late to be patched. I’ve been hard at work ever since I acquired a PlayStation VR in order to apply it to Sword Of Moonlight, but got taken off guard by the headset’s enchanting home-theater mode. (More on it later.)

There are so many possible releases, all up in the air, right now, never mind VR; Nevertheless, in the last several days it’s been the only thing I can think about. I expected to release a full PlayStation VR demonstration, except for the headset that I received seemed to have apparent display anomalies that forced me to send it back for a replacement, and so in the meantime I could only finish the demonstration’s visual component:

Continued: Let there be light

This is going to be a short post: I’ve been working hard (and often) on a major release that expands upon the profile editing tools and integrates them into the main experience; The crude “DLC” tools for making all new building-blocks for custom projects or to share. It’s taking a long time. There are five tools, and a sixth is needed. Though small, they’re very dense, each of them. They are to be seamlessly integrated by replacing the 3D model viewing elements with the new tools, since they include views of the 3D models. They have a lot more personality, and they are able to use the same extensions as the player, and so appear identical to the games. Upon completion, only the level designer will remain to be similarly upgraded. I feel that I will want to embark on that project, since it will otherwise appear not up-to-code until I do so.

Continued: Things to come

So, I realized recently a bug was introduced into the level design tool — not long ago, but not so recently either — that is so sinister that I stopped everything to prepare a new release in order to minimize the possibility of spoiling anyone’s fun.

Truth is, I was looking for an out anyway, since the latest work has spun off into multiple different directions, some completely unpredictable. The genesis of this release sprung from an inspired moment, that I couldn’t have predicted at all, at the time. And ended with only the basics of that idea realized. Instead, the focus of this release became a small side project to find a way for the tool’s two number tables to be able to set a column to the same value for more than one row at a time — in any combination. I wanted to do this since two or three releases ago, because this will be important in the future, in order to fully take advantage of a new way to adjust the order items are displayed in game menus. The basic problem being that the items need to be in the game before they can be so adjusted, and until now there was no easy way to do that than to manually select every one individually and input a quantity figure into these tables.

The reason this mushroomed, is the tables themselves are unique among the element’s of Sword of Moonlight’s tools. And since they are only in two relatively insignificant places, I had not personally spent a lot of time with them, and now that I was doing so, I saw their evidently substandard state, and felt it was high time to bring them up to code, whatever it took.

Continued: Spinning plates!

I’ve prepared a new release in 3 days flat, and am rushing it out to make this January 31 blog post.

I am very eager to work on Sword of Moonlight again. I’ve been absent since mid December, working on various things, some tangential to Sword of Moonlight, but mostly I’ve been very frustrated, feeling as if I was not being productive, whether or not I have been, the feeling persisted. Ostensibly I was working on a difficult problem to do with writing XML like documents and accoutrements to ZIP archives, within a framework of my own devising that is — as it turns out — perhaps too transparent for its own good. I cannot say why that work drug itself out for so long, other than it’s highly conceptual and because it was in service of a “software library” its bar is much higher than Sword of Moonlight’s. Adding insult to injury is the feature itself is more a logical gap than a pressing matter — no one really needs it, but logically it should be part of the feature set. It’s refreshing to be able to turn out a new and important feature in 3 days in comparison.

Continued: Back!