simple machines forum

I’m happy to announce 2 new releases have been published. The current release is a foray into opening up Sword of Moonlight’s SFX system to tinkering and sharing. The previous release went unannounced, but I just want to add that it adds a new kind of animation called skin or weight animation, that allows for animation that is somewhere in between the two other animation types, by combining skeleton based animation with the appearance of soft or continuous skin, instead of hard body parts that do not deform.

To “democratize” the SFX system, there is now a DATA/SFX/PROF folder with a new kind of profile that represents a single entry in the classical SFX.DAT table. In addition these profiles can assign models and sound effects (only primaries) that aren’t restricted to 4 digit file names. There aren’t any new features added other than to hopefully make it possible to design SFX profiles and share them and use custom file names for this purpose. Finally a new SFX.DAT table is generated, and stored in your PARAM folder, along with an SFX.PRO file that contains these extended file names.

This release includes profiles of this kind that reconstruct the original SFX.DAT table. The old table is still there behind them, however editing it does not take precedence over the profiles, the profiles themselves need to be saved like regular files. I could not remove the existing SFX.DAT table without disturbing too much, and I would like it to remain as a reminder of how SOM works, and why it works that way.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=380.0 (previous release information)

Attachments

 Aleph.png 

Here is something exciting. I've managed to get skin/weight/soft skeletal animation working for the first time. I'm not making a blog post for this release since this is only going to make a difference for future character models.

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.14.zip
https://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/x2mdl.dll/1.0.1.12.zip

In the attachment I've shown how I was helped to extract this model of Aleph from KF3. In MM3D I added a skeleton to it, and worked on adding appropriate "influences" (weights) so the model can be made to stand up. I developed a rudimentary weight painting tool to make this possible. Then, most recently, I worked on "importing" it into SOM with x2mdl and implementing the new feature inside of SOM.

Now we can imagine Aleph (aka Alexander) standing on the beach in KF2...

Attachments

 SOM_MAP elements.png 

I kid with my schizophrenia that we do “shadow work” and “light work”, meaning I feel like my brain is a nursery school for pod people, implications unknown. These sound like Jungian and New Age terms, but shadow work can also mean things like homemaking (unpaid labor) or anything we do for commercial companies on our own behalf in order to save them the expense. Light work just means I try to not work too hard. I.e. lightly.

I haven’t been blogging here enough. Everything in my life is complicated and grueling now. I can’t remember what all is in the latest release of SomEx here, but I know it has animated shadows for NPCs now. And I’ve just worked on a patch that shows elements in SOM_MAP’s main screen, and it will let you copy/paste and rotate them from that screen, with full, unlimited undo support. I’ll try to remember more things in the forum.

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.10.zip
http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/text/

There are new language packs that add needed buttons to SOM_MAP. They're ON/OFF in the provided screenshot.

The shadow system makes model conversion take longer. Sometimes the idle animations can be a little glitchy. I hope to figure out a fix. Sometime later on.

Sleep has been very complicated for me lately. Sometimes I feel like the world is "The Matrix" and it wants us all to be dead, by our own hand. It's truly horrible what bad/evil schizophrenic voices can come up with

"Warui" they're saying now

Please add yourself to my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight)

Schizophrenia has been making everything in my life twice as hard for about 1.5 years now. I’m sorry to apologize for my infrequent blog posts ever since this condition entered/interrupted my (old) life.

I want to make this a statement, but I’m still trying to make progress on Sword of Moonlight. I’m writing to formally announce there’s a new SomEx “release” available/uploaded. It’s focused on variable speed animation, enabling playback on monitors with higher than 60hz frame rates. The first-person arm animations are now timed according to the power gauges. There’s also a patch that adds multi undo and redo to SOM_MAP.

My schizophrenia is telling me I should try to explain how it affects my life. I or “we” live with constant talking “voices” that are like psychic communications, and mine are dialogues, where I’m able to interrupt them, and they’re able to understand what I’m thinking about what they’re saying, and adjust their “dialogue” accordingly. I have experienced audiovisual hallucinations, but they are infrequent. We are depressed to some degree most of the time. I’m taking a small dosage of “prozac” and several drugs in total. I’m not experiencing behavioral problems. I’m trying to remain stress free for my health and longevity. I’m lying down as I need to. I’m mostly getting up to do things when I reach a point of feeling disgusted with myself, my inactivity rather prompts me to get up and do something, and lie back down. My finances and independence are helped by SSI in the US. I will be receiving a full amount of assistance beginning on August 1. In light of all of this you can still support me and Sword of Moonlight on my Patreon. I’m not really a low-energy person now, however my lifestyle is touch and go, and probably less productive. I’ve enjoyed talking to my voices, because I like to talk, and I find most people don’t want to talk. I’m always looking for a silver lining. They’re currently excited that we’re going to my cousin’s wedding tomorrow. They want everyone to know that! (They think my blog posts here aren’t personable enough!!)

So PLEASE check out SOM and try out the map editor with full undo/redo. It also draws more smooth now too!

More: swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k/devlog/725225/variable-frame-rate-animation

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.6.zip is the current release file.

It's also available at http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/main/single-file-download/

Language packs are needed to get the Redo button to appear. Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z works to redo with or without this new button. The Delete button is removed. And in SOM_PRM the Record and Remove buttons are removed to match. The Cut buttons can still be used, and your Del key should still work.

BTW, if anybody would like to join this forum, the current process is to signup for the main site and go to (or join) the r/SwordOfMoonlight Discord at https://discord.gg/x782kpHQ7E and ask for me there (m. is my name there) to okay your new user account. This is on account email is no longer working from this website, so it can't email your password to you. These instructions are part of the signup form. I've been thinking about trying to add Google login integration, if/when interest grows.

New Release (SVN Update or Download)

I've bumped the version up to 1.2.5.4 and uploaded new files. New features are much better frame rate, I now run at 120hz, and I've worked on the BSP system for my project, but it requires do_bsp and it requires using a new "pin" system in SOM_MAP where tiles disappear when they shouldn't. Pins are placed by right-clicking on the checkpoints screen. I've added preliminary animations for guarding and heavy attacks/counters with weapons. This is a nice addition to complement shields.

Note, using the bsp system can improve frame rates, and is good if you want to put a lot of monsters and things inside interior spaces. But the main boos for the frame rate comes from using a newer compiler, and Windows XP is no longer supported.

Woops! I just found a killer bug in the KF1 demo with do_fix_damage_calculus=no.

KING'S FIELD

[Bugfix]

do_fix_damage_calculus = no

What was going on is the Strength and Magic bonuses aren't added so hits are 1 damage! I feel like crap about this.
I've fixed the SomEx.dll file if anyone wants it (http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.2.zip)
I've also updated the demo to include shields. And I think there may have been a problem with the MPX files. They now have to be built with SOM_MAP before playing, and I've added an Instructions.txt file to explain how to do it (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/Sword-of-Moonlight/Library/KING'S-FIELD/Instructions.txt)

For the record, I've now disabled the "BSP" system that hides chambers that shouldn't be visible by default. It can be turned on with a do_bsp [Option] but it has some problems because I've worked on making it work for layers.

There's a new feature in SOM_MAP on the "checkpoints" screen that lets you right-click to add a "pin" which will make a tile remain visible always.

This is helpful in some places where there are exterior/outdoor tiles, but it's also being used to patch over problem areas in the new BSP system.

The new system automatically fills all empty cells with the equivalent of a dummy tile. This is needed with layers. Unfortunately it sometimes malfunctions. I've turned it on in my KF2 demo and I've just used the "pin" system to fix problem areas.

BSP is off by default for backward compatibility and to not make new developers figure out how to use the new pinning system. The reason for all of this is to improve frame rates. And if you use the BSP system wisely you can cram a lot more monsters into interior/indoor areas. The reason you can is anything that's hidden by the BSP system won't count against the frame rate, i.e. performance.

Edited: There's also an Alt+Alt+B hotkey to enable/disable the BSP system when do_bsp is in use.

Yesterday I uploaded some shield models that I mistakenly left out of the recent shield feature update. This makes shields either unusable or invisible without adding these models back. I found I neglected to SVN Add them.

Attachments

 SOM shadows.png 

Here's an early look at custom generated shadows. I'm thinking this is a big improvement. It's taken a lot of time to work out the details, and I'm only about 1/3rd the way through probably. I think I'll take a break and leave them as "static" images for right now.

Attachments

 shadow preview.png 

I'm trying to generate shadow textures in x2mdl. I'm planning on packing these into ico (icon) files and putting one image in each RGBA channel. To draw them I think R and A images will need to be identical on subsequent frames. I don't know if they'll be doubled in the ICO file or not, but they'd need to be unpacked that way if not.

The idea is to blend between 4 frames in the shader. Only 2 frames will be needed but the others will still be calculated since they're in the same textures. They're just color channels after all. It'll probably slow down model conversion because the blurring effect has to pull in a bunch of pixels for each pixel, and there will be one of these for each animation frame.

I hope it will be worth it. For the Viper monster a round circle really doesn't make sense.

EDITED: Note, this image is a kraken's from KF2. I got this by doing 2 passes. The first pass just blurs everything by a 4 pixel radius. (It looks like more than 4 pixels because the white pixel 4 pixels from the edge is darkened and the dark pixel 4 pixels inside the edge is also lightened.) It needs to be that big to not look aliased. Antialiasing (multisample) isn't used because a height map is generated to produce some effects like you get if you are directly underneath a light. Unfortunately it's a little strange to be directly under a light all the time, but it's a little better than the fully abstract circle I think.