I’m pleased to announce I’ve completed the most grueling round of work I’ve ever done on Sword of Moonlight and all the new files are online for the taking.

I did two long release cycles back-to-back except the first was not published because it didn’t have anything to offer to the general public. What it was instead was a big task to bolt on an OpenGL based alternative mode for SOM because new VR peripherals for PC don’t work with Direct3D 9. I chose OpenGL because I’ve used it plenty in the past and the newer systems like Vulkan and Direct3D 11 or 12 are completely different in terms of their design and are much more complicated, so it would be an even bigger effort to write code for those and it would be very alien to my past experience.

Continued: Long time no update! (Sorry about that)

Something of note occurred a while ago. Briefly, for a long time now Sword of Moonlight has had a unique anti-aliasing technique for which I’ve continued to develop complementary 3D image-based graphical effects. This line of work has matured and now has reached a conclusion. It started when I had an idea I thought could address its main weakness: that is it takes more than one image frame to create a double exposure image, which means it can’t anti-alias a single image by itself, or put another way: when a picture is moving it can’t do its job.

This is an economical solution because it doesn’t require any resources or time on the computer to compute its results. When a picture is moving it can be hard to make out its edges, so anti-aliasing isn’t as important. So it mostly washes out, except it’s still a legitimate mark against this technique. To solve this problem (with an equally no resources solution) (as well as it can be solved) the new complementary technique works to remove contrast on moving edges. This looks like an unfocused image on the moving edge.

Continued: Anti-aliasing announcement

At https://swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k I’ve published an early demo of my King’s Field II project that’s haunted me for the past half year. At the speed I was able to work I’ve only produced a beginning that comprises my goals for the second demo I promised almost two years ago, to the day. Most the lost time was bound up in developing tools for working with the 3D models and ensuring compatibility with the existing models. This included developing a cross-platform UI system and 3D art package and utilities.

The demo is using a new update to Sword of Moonlight that’s also the subject of this announcement. It includes a number of features that aren’t yet readily accessible to projects, since they’re not fully developed and integrated into the basic tools. In the final month before publishing I found myself working furiously on the control system since it made some interesting leaps at the last moment and I wanted to take it as a sign I should ride that wave in order to use its public visibility to showcase the control system.

Continued: 25th Anniversary Project

Today I published a body of work that’s been underway for some weeks. I’m doing a write up since things have been quiet around here in the meantime. I’ve been doing three projects with some overlap, 1 has been my ongoing work on the Sword of Moonlight animation file format, and 2 at some point I realized a simple way to have the animations playback at full speed at 60 frames per second, as opposed to playing out at 30 frames per second, and 3 because of this change numerous other parts of the player software had to be upgraded to double speed at the same time. At the same time I’ve been looking at the model of a human arm that appears when you use your weapon in the games, and how it is positioned on screen, since Sword of Moonlight does it differently from King’s Field. I don’t know if it’s based on Shadow Tower of if it just does it its own way.

Continued: Speed of life

So, it turns out when I migrated the site to a new host a while ago I didn’t know that the authz_svn_module module had to be configured to get vanilla protection of the Subversion files containing the Sword of Moonlight downloads, so it turns out somebody or something was making revisions to the files, so I’m scrambling to try to restore it.

If you had the misfortune of downloading these files, the first ones are listed on the full page of this post (go through the “Continued” link) so you can see if you have these among your personal files. If you do I recommend deleting your installation and go back through the download and install process.

Continued: Intruder alert!

It turns out King’s Field II monsters exceed the limit Sword of Moonlight imposes. I feel like the limit doesn’t make much sense, but From Software saw fit to limit it to 128 so-called enemies for a given level in your project’s video game. KFII treats its characters and monsters identically, and caps them at 200 on each of its two-story zones. SOM had a layer system that was disabled before it was published. I’ve since restored it, some time last year I think. It would have allowed each layer to have 128 more monsters, in which case its limit may have been 256 for a two-story level, which would have exceeded KFII’s limit.

When I restored the new layer system I decided to limit it to level geometry, so that layers don’t bring in new elements like monsters. That’s a better system because I imagined layers can be used to tackle the artistic limits of SOM’s grid based level design. I suspect not many game systems use grids any longer, but it’s something I feel is a great strength for SOM. I think there is lost wisdom in many of its anachronisms. By putting monsters on layers it isn’t clear what happens when they cross between layers or if that would even have been possible in the original system that got disabled. By artistic limits, I mean things like, you might want a layer to just be a ceiling for example, so you can have a lower ceiling on some section, or just have the elevation of the ceiling be independent of the floor. If you can’t do that you have great limits in design possibilities since the only other way to do this is to make new tile models for every combination of floor and ceiling. The new layer system can represent many things like a plane of water or mist or fog or just plug holes in the existing tile configuration. Anybody who’s ever worked with SOM runs into these limits.

Continued: Unleashing monsters