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.)

I’m not sure where to begin. There’s a new mega-release up. With lots of surprises in store! It finalizes the jumping model, and adds a way to lower the point-of-view 1/3rd, letting you pass beneath things at about 22% below head level. It might not sound like much (these figures are adjustable) but even for the default height — that’s a bit on the short side — this comes out to about a full screen at nose length; which will seem like a lot.

The new feature complements jumping, since jumping now requires the release of the ground-based movement inputs. If you do not jump but instead move away, then you are able to squat/hunker down in this way. If running this is automatically done so that you do not have to stop to do so. If pressed up against a passageway or obstruction, beginning to run will pass beneath it at walking speed, at which point you can stop running if you only wish to enter the space. (If you do not jump while running you simply return to a walking gait. This should go without saying.)

There is the beginning of a way to run at full speed. There is no penalty for doing so at this time. It is not possible to run at full speed when there is not room to stand fully erect. Doing so requires that you hold down all three buttons. This release was supposed to add the ability to look behind while running, by holding down either button, so that when they cancel each other out you run at full speed instead. Run for your life as it were. However because a bigger priority was finalizing the jumping model, all efforts got directed at its complement in order to fill the hole opened up in the control scheme…

Continued: A light at the end of the tunnel…

It’s been quiet, too quiet. I’ve been at work on a new release for five months now. I wanted this post to be about a release including a halfway usable version of the new tool I’ve been working on all of that time; or actually, the truth is I wanted that a month or two ago.

But instead what I do have is technically a kind of a milestone. To begin with, here I am announcing a new release, one that even warranted changing the minor version number. The “technical” milestone is this release puts a stop to a longstanding problem of debris collecting on Sword of Moonlight’s tool suite’s “windows”; for example when another window is moved in front of one of Sword of Moonlight’s. Luckily it hadn’t been a bigger deal since Windows Vista because it works differently.

However if for any reason you need to use the Basic or Classic modes, or Windows XP (I have a nettop with XP installed myself) then until now there wasn’t much you could do beyond occasionally grabbing your window and taking it to the bottom of the screen and back to force it to clean up its act. Ha! Yeah, not cool. And while it may not seem like a whole lot, especially if you’ve moved on to newer Windows, nevertheless working correctly across the various supported versions of Windows and their various modes as well is at the very least a necessary step on the road to a Sword of Moonlight “beta”.

Continued: Say goodbye to dirty windows forever!

This micro-release includes a complete makeover in terms of how Sword of Moonlight interacts with the Windows desktop. Windows 7 introduced a number of new taskbar related features that impose restrictions on how applications behave. It took me so long to notice that this is a problem for SOM because these new features are disabled for programs that are not stored on a local disk volume.

The immediate problems stemming from this were addressed by a patch that was made to the previous release. Now I am following up with a full treatment for post-Vista versions of Windows. That said the changes apply to all supported versions of Windows. I had not intended to do so until tests I ran on XP earlier today showed that this is necessary. Anyway, it’s probably for the best.

In the beginning of this release my goal was to decide how to best group the various tools on the taskbar, and how to establish a program that can be “pinned” to the taskbar. Pinning is absolutely essential in Windows 8 since it doesn’t possess a Start menu, although this is rumored to be changing in the next iteration, but one wonders even if it does, will the menu be backported to 8?

I also looked into adding an extended menu to the launcher early on; this is a feature wherein Windows 7 it’s possible to right-click icons in the taskbar and Start menu in order to open a menu that can be customized to a degree. Indeed a lot of the problems arise from an apparent inability to customize the built-in section of this menu.

But I didn’t stop there. I’ve taken the opportunity to completely rethink and rebrand the superficial experience, and in the process I’ve been able to streamline numerous aspects of the initiation process in ways that I find extraordinarily pleasing. By rebrand I mean to say that I put a lot of work into the icons, and even changed some of them, including the shortcut titles that accompany them and the product descriptions embedded in the programs files (I didn’t change any of FromSoftware’s product information, although it could probably stand to be changed. In any case it’s never visible.)

Continued: 7 ways Sword of Moonlight has changed

Two weeks — and it’s new release time once again. What’s new is some old stuff around control mechanics from last year has been finalized so to be presentable in game form.

Namely the player can go anywhere jumping and climbing wise without running into problems around ceilings, and transitions between levels and within levels should now be seamless.

There are also critical fixes pertaining to the prior release for anyone not keeping up with patches, and the in-game menus are a little bit nicer now thanks to a good idea that happened between releases; the idea was to let text in the menus be scooted over to make more room, so that there is no longer any abbreviated text to be found in the built-in English translation.

Last but not least there is a new feature that lets the player character behave as a monster does when they get hit. It replaces the old experimental approach to this, and is super easy to setup. I must add that I was particularly pleased with this unexpected addition, and very pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. I regard it as a natural fit; the best part of working on Sword of Moonlight for me has to be the developments I never saw coming…

For me it’s an absolute joy, a supreme joy, and so far an absolutely private joy of my own for myself. What a shame. I encourage everyone following Sword of Moonlight to get involved. You can wait but you will miss out on the formative period if you do.

*cough* *cough*

There is a new release up — concluding what became five months work to ready textual translations for Sword of Moonlight’s core tools and data files. What we have is bare bones for now. For Japanese you won’t need to change a thing. For English you will still need to follow these directions until further notice.

What’s changed, aside from every single profile in the DATA file tree, is things are now known by their names. For example, the Moonlight Sword is no longer described as “Great sword [2]“, but is instead described simply as (wait for it) “Moonlight Sword”. Just the same all characters are described by their name as it appears in the King’s Field remake/sample game. Or more precisely the names were taken from the original PlayStation game. The remaining profiles are assigned characters taken from the game’s sequels.

The rationale behind this change is to make it easier to pick a profile out of a menu, but also to make way for future profiles. Of which we can assume there will be a multitude. Last but not least, in order to restore the original convention (although as a matter of fact, there is ample evidence in the profiles themselves that this policy change actually reverts to a prior, long lost, eventually overturned policy) a new system has been devised to allow project managers to sort profiles into arbitrary groups, or sets, and all of the profiles have been assigned to more than 100 such sets as part of this release.

The sets are not the same, but similar. The Moonlight Sword is part of the longsword set, so it appears alongside other longswords, rather than “great swords” — of which there actually are none. Oh and! In an unexpected twist, this release makes it easier than ever to get the most out of Sword of Moonlight thanks to some additions to the “new project” step.

Further details (and patches) are as always covered within the forum addendum, but before going any further I must remind you that this is really just one more of many more steps. In the right direction sure. The text is all done. But the art is still a shambles at best, and so on.