For a very long time I’ve pursued a side project of developing art productivity software to support Sword of Moonlight. For many years I’ve worked on developing COLLADA as a format for storing “3D” art for use by game projects.

Since mid-to-early last year I’ve been busy developing an actual application for artists to use in place of popular 3D modeling packages like Blender. That’s taken up most of my time, and I was doing it in preparation to work on my personal game project to port King’s Field II to Sword of Moonlight.

Continued: Making "modeling" software

I’ve been itching to write a post for this blog ever since my last, if not for a subject. If I had staid course I think by now I’d have a release of the 3D modeling software I’ve been developing ever since earlier last year. But I have something better since not long ago I heard from the Moratheia project it’s back on (this was posted sometime earlier, complete with a new image) which shortly put me to work on Sword of Moonlight!

I’ve not put out a new release since mid last year, and hadn’t intended to release this one now after just 2 or 3 weeks except I want to write a blog and publish an unplanned fix for the PlayStation and Xbox trigger buttons I’d rather not sit on.

Continued: Every part of the controller

For a while (several months) it’s been unclear what was going to happen to this site since I had to move it to a new hosting company and it wasn’t clear if I would be able to find one. Because I didn’t know what would happen and wanted to keep a banner up to communicate the situation I’ve abstained from blogging until the situation had been resolved.

That banner is still available as the previous blog post (to this one) dating back to March. I refer you to it for details. First the old company decided to wait on its deadline to move, so I had more time to work with, but my account ran out of funds, and under the circumstances it didn’t make sense to buy a new long term plan. But lucky for us, by this time I finally found news that the staff of the old company (and maybe some clients too) endeavored to make a new company out of its ashes, and so my decision about where to go next was made crystal clear. That’s the greatest relief and the best possible happy ending I could have dreamed of. The new host is called Opalstack, and there’s a link at the bottom of the page layout here.

I hope to make up for the absence of blog posts in the coming months. Below pictured are two blog subjects that might have been, that received only update lines in the aforementioned banner posting. The first image is of a new effect that blends the seams in map geometry together. This is something that I suppose Sword of Moonlight should have had all along. It was omitted like many things because the software’s tendency to neglect anything not required by the pack-in remake of King’s Field. The second image is a new extension that makes it possible to have transparent elements to base their opacity on their volume along an imaginary line between the viewer and pixels. It’s per-pixel in other words. Combined with the new layers feature it enables many special effects.

Lately I’ve been working on a precursor to the Daedalus 3-D project so that I can make progress transferring King’s Field II’s animations over to Sword of Moonlight. And most lately I’ve been dividing my time trying to transfer this website over to this new host, that has not been a simple job, owing to some technical challenges that I may go into in the forum-discussion accompanying this blog post. It’s possible not everything works.

Heads up, my web-hosting service provider (WebFaction) is in the process of being bought-out/taken-over by GoDaddy. I don’t understand the nature of this kind of transaction myself, since it’s basically just disappearing, by summer. It’s not like GoDaddy is continuing the service, and so it’s hard to gauge what is the value of such a buyout to an entity like GoDaddy. The customers are all going to leave, or are having to leave. I don’t know if GoDaddy is “buying” the infrastructure (old, aging computer stuff, buildings) or what?! Or if it helps the WebFaction owners get out from under a crushing rock of some kind. There’s scant details and no transparency.

My host (since this website, and others, has existed) seems like it was pretty unique, in serving niche for software developers, on a tight budget. I’m not seeing a lot of alternatives to change over to. I may even have to consider giving up on having website(s) for a little while. But I want everyone reading this site to know that everything (except for the vagaries of hosting website(s)) is going very well for Sword of Moonlight. And even though, I should probably keep this a secret for a little longer, I want to share that there are plans underway to resurrect King’s Field, for which the coast seems clear. And also very good things are happening/developing on the VR integration front.

Continued: Some website turbulence is imminent…

Damn! it’s been 3 months without an update. I guess I should put something… here.

Continued: Not dead! King's Field II

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