Topic: EXIT: There's no place like home (Read 12878 times)

Holey Moley · « **on:** November 30, 2019, 01:55:55 PM »

Quote from: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/archives/sword-of-moonlight/2019/11/theres-no-place-like-home/

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.

It's been a while since I've done this! Make a blog post/forum discussion post. I guess I've done this like a robot for years. I assume people find and read them or even subscribe, but I don't know. People of this world are so hard to reach. I sometimes don't write a forum post immediately after a blog post because writing one takes the wind out of me, forgive me. But I have to satisfy the need for the cross-link.

I suspect that nothing on this new server is being cached in the browser. I have to look into it, but it seems to always be reloading. I have a bit more control over the new website owing to there wasn't as much infrastructure in place as at the old company so I was encouraged to install pretty much all of the hosting software into my account. That's actually a good development I believe since it means I may be better positioned to maintain the site in the future since everything it needs to operate is in theory inside its file tree, so that I can make copies of it, ones to work on and one to publish, and maybe others to experiment with... crazily I may even try to update the various web software involved, which all date back many years at this point. As a side effect I have to micromanage more, but that means more freedom too.

That is partly the difficulty I experienced in transferring this site (I have more sites to transfer too, one at a time, including swordofmoonlight.org.) The other big part was a desire to get with the program and upgrade from PHP5 to PHP7, that was not easy because they are very different. I couldn't risk just updating the software to new versions to do that, so I had to go into my own software and retrofit it myself, as its developers must have done at some stage during the past half-decade. Needless to say some things may not work properly. But everything I know of seems to be working. I could have fallen back to PHP5 also, and I plan to do that for some websites that I'm not interested in bringing into the future (although at some point I will have to figure out something if I plan to keep them online) but for the main sites I want to test them live so that I can stumble over anything that's broken and fix it. If you don't use them there's no other way to discover problems.

The most important thing is the Sword of Moonlight files are available for anyone that wants to try them out, even though almost no one seems to give them more than a passing glance. Sometimes I wish I could change the world's collective attention span with a snap of my fingers

Holey Moley · « **Reply #1 on:** December 04, 2019, 04:01:19 PM »

Here (https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/download/win32-demo/mm3d-portable.zip) is a single EXE version of the 3D modeling software project I've been hard at work at for a while now.

That is a direct download link, more information is here (https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-demo) and there is source code in the directories above that one. Please give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

P.S. Publishing this is a major milestone for myself. I've been wanting to get it off my chest so-to-speak plus it's good to have files out in the wild so I know they don't depend on my own safekeeping abilities.

Background: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=293.0

Holey Moley · « **Reply #2 on:** December 09, 2019, 03:15:54 AM »

The wiki (http://en.swordofmoonlight.org) is now migrated. It was a good sized job to upgrade the wiki software owing to lots of conversion work around the theme.

I just did some work on the (unused) web-ring system to deal with X-Frame-Options headers that prevent frames from loading cross-domain documents.

There's still things inside swordofmoonlight.net (WordPress) to work on but otherwise my Sword of Moonlight sites are both migrated now. For me the new wiki only took an hour to be available under the domain name. The blog took almost a day. But it can be different depending on where you are on the Internet.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #3 on:** December 11, 2019, 12:25:31 AM »

The experimental Subversion integration and WebGL model viewer stuff is back online:

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/wp-admin/admin.php?page=database&home=pc&view=/intelligence/reactive/set/マントラップ&file=/data/enemy/prof/0002.prf

EDITED: You can use Guest Login to login without making an account. One word per field.

The Subversion stuff is really good for downloading old versions of files, but most of the features I imagined aren't implemented, just what I need to work. I wish that it had an English translation at least. Not enough time to do everything by myself.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #4 on:** December 26, 2019, 05:30:35 AM »

I do a yearly summary/overview on GameFAQs (assuming people still use it) that I've just posted here (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/958393-sword-of-moonlight-kings-field-making-tool/78282725) but FWIW it doesn't say much more than what's in this post. In fact I just linked to it for the most part.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #5 on:** January 13, 2020, 08:33:56 PM »

Full disclosure:

Over the holidays I had to find a replacement for my television and happened across a decent deal on a PlayStation 4 for $200 minus a few bundled games.

The last few days I've been playing Witcher III. I don't know if I will stick with it, but I've put well over ten hours into it. At least. I can't say if I've enjoyed myself or not, but it's addictive in a way that may or may not be a net positive thing. Anyway, to the degree I play a game it naturally subtracts from my spare time to work on Sword of Moonlight stuff.

So if it seems slower than normal around here it's a real possibility I'm dividing my time with a game right now. I haven't played any games in a few years or more. So I'm probably owed some time off. I have a handful of games at my disposal, but I don't usually play a game for long nowadays. I'm really more into Japanese games, and have never liked English games for the most part. But Japanese games have just gotten stupid for like 10yrs and counting so, so I haven't been playing many games, which is probably a good thing... especially for Sword of Moonlight.

EDITED: For the record, it cuts in my time for other things too. It's not just SOM bearing the downtime. I'm also a little burned out right now, so I'm doing my best to do programming work little by little, sometimes failing on a day to day basis.

P.S. I will say I don't believe the way games like Witcher are major time sinks is the way games should be. I think it's really a very shallow experience. I'm a little drawn to it because its set up is a lot like Vampire Hunter D, I won't lie. But without any of D's coolness. Functionally the characters are virtually identical. The stakes are just radically different. No pun intended. I think an ideal King's Field game is very short and tight lipped by comparison. Witcher just leads you along giving you things to do dividing half of its time with long-winded questionably executed talk sequences. Any of its scenarios could be entire games in themselves if they were truly satisfying. Well, I'm lucky since most are nominating Witcher as the game of the decade. Since I'm not bowled over I shouldn't have to sift through the rest of the decade's offerings once I'm done with it.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #6 on:** January 26, 2020, 02:36:31 PM »

Bi-weekly update:

I'm (still) very slowly working on the 3D modeling software project. I'm very happy with how it's coming along, but it does feel like I'm not getting a whole lot done. Maybe that's just what a quality job feels like. I do work slowing and methodically. I'm most impressed with the look-and-feel of it, which makes me glad because that's something I'm no good at predicting or planning for. It surprises me.

I'm now a co-moderator in the King's Field subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/
https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/ei2rw7/looks_like_someone_should_takeover_rkingsfield_to/

This came about only because Reddit has thrown out its old theming facilities in favor of an incompatible system, that left the subreddit's theme in a generic state that looked like nobody cares for it. So I threw in my hat.

Winter is harsh, I think it slows me down. My Witcher III game is around level 16. I don't know how many hours or if I've even enjoyed myself or if I will forget it exists at any moment. It's perfectly bland and inoffensive. I don't know what to make of it. I think games shouldn't take so long to complete. At least with old school JRPG titles the scenarios felt memorable. I can't say anything about Witcher is memorable. I think it knows that if anything about itself were memorable it would undermine its project as a whole, of seeming to walk a very fine line of not putting you off while keeping you just curious enough about what might happen next. It feels insidious.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #7 on:** January 29, 2020, 07:07:20 PM »

Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.12.zip

This patch adds a way to swap the controller buttons in the screens that only use the first four buttons. It occurred to me that SOM probably uses the Japanese sense and so US players may find it difficult to deal with. (I never even noticed because I'd had imported PlayStations and other consoles for all my adult life.)

The system is designed to be simple and easy to discover, so you just press the 5th or 6th button which is usually L1 and R1 I think, and those will swap what's normally the 1st and 2nd or 3rd and 4th buttons.

Except there is custom remapping built-in for Sony's DualShock4 because it's so weird, so it will have the same effect but it uses 2nd and 3rd and 1st and 4th. Which is bonkers. The axis mapping is just as bonkers... it's like Sony made it hostile on purpose.

EDITED: For the record I don't actually know to what degree this affects people. I think that the confirm button is simply the 1st button, and I can't remember what that was for the Xbox controller I had when I added Xbox support. I think probably the DualShock4 support will assign confirm to O which is the Japanese convention. I'm sure this feature is useful in that case. I could swap that. But SOM is technically Japanese.

I just hope the feature doesn't cause problems for people who accidentally/habitually press the L1 and R1 buttons. If so I will have to add a way to disable it.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #8 on:** February 08, 2020, 03:16:03 AM »

Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.12.zip

A new feature I'm looking into (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=301) instantly bore fruit after it caused me to stumble upon a bug that this patch is intended to correct. The glitch happens when you push the action button up against a climbable surface but instead of letting go you hold the button until it's too late to be able to climb. That pretty much describes the feature I'm working on, except it's limited to climbable platforms. I never noticed the problem because I guess I never tried to do that. There's not real reason to right now. The unwanted behavior is you kind of sink into the wall and get violently spat back out. Luckily the fix doesn't have any visible disturbance, which is a good sign for the feature I'm working on. I thought it might be noticeable even after a fix. You never know. With controls different kinds of maneuvers are always coming into conflict with others. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons you can't have it both ways.

I always drop everything to fix a bug. It was a good reintroduction to my code. It takes me a while to reaquaint myself after a prolonged absence.

ALSO this patch happens to include some new extensions that add a fog effect to the volume based transparency feature described here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=295.msg2778#msg2778)

The fog is like the color fog in the distance except for the likes of underwater or otherwise transparent things that use these new [Volume] extensions. It can make a body of water appear darker in its depths or make it appear muddy as if there is a cloud of sediments that renders the water to appear as a single color as opposed to a dynamic surface.

EDITED: I had to reupload the patch after realizing a last second change I made was wrong WRT the unrelated the crouching feature. I should've just left it alone. But I'm glad I realized the mistake. (I'm glad how my brain consistently informs me of my mistakes after a nights rest!! I should probably only upload the day after.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #9 on:** February 13, 2020, 11:22:25 AM »

I found a rendering bug in the Volume demo yesterday. I thought I would get to it today but didn't make it past one item on my to-do list.

I think I fixed a problem with the mouse cursor not always being available depending on how things start out desktop layout wise. That got me looking at the mouse cursor code and gave me an idea to try to use it to put a crosshair cursor in the middle of the screen by double-clicking to use the mouse to play instead of single clicking. I don't recommend the mouse but it's useful for doing work sometimes. It's actually feels pretty good these days. That is mainly a result of my programming some pretty involved stuff to smooth over the 7 gait analog system so you hopefully can't tell it's just 7 gaits, like 7 bicycle speeds. Or technically 7.5.

I thought a crosshair might come in handy for something to someone. It jiggles by 1 pixel on my system when you move the mouse. It seems unnecessary. Maybe that's so you know the mouse battery isn't dead. I don't know. It can be used with a controller and I mapped the H key to it.

I think I noticed some other issues. The mouse wheel system always seemed a little amiss to me. That may have been because of a stray test that shouldn't have been. I've made it so it always works and it works the same with the weak capture mode. It's used to enter the strong-capture mode. It's like a safety lock. Basically the lock works the same now, but engaging it after unlocking enters the strong-capture mode no differently.

Finally I noticed the F10 key acting weird. That may be a new development, but I went to some length to be able to use it. Adding double-click to the mix turned out to be time consuming too. F10 is actually a special key. It seems to be used to reclaim your mouse cursor. The program isn't told when it's released and when it is released Windows seems to revert the cursor to its state before it was pressed. But I was able to control the cursor at least while pressed. Then I was able to program a backdoor into the DirectInput code that has more "direct" access to keys for games. And so I was able to make it act more friendly I think. It's function is similar to the Alt key, but I think some time ago I decided to make it behave like the mouse wheel feature instead, so that you have a manual way to access it without a mouse with a wheel. It's still pretty similar to Alt, but not identical. The main difference after all my work is when pressed it stays on the screen in the same state after F10 is released, like Alt would.

In many programs F10 acts like Alt for accessing the classic menu bar. I'm not sure what the history behind that is.

I put up a demo the other day so I may not patch this release again and instead opt to patch the demo and report it here. (The Volume demo looks fine except on some spots in some levels, i.e. most the time it works by accident.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #10 on:** February 15, 2020, 07:40:00 AM »

Demo

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.14.zip

Here is that demo I promised. The rendering bug I mentioned turned out to not be about the volume-texture feature but transparent elements more broadly.

Unfortunately I don't want to patch the current release since the controls code is not in an ideal state after all of the changes I've made (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=301.0) that this demo is made to showcase. I can't go back to the old code just for a patch.

This demo also has some real problems in the controls area but they aren't really noticeable. I have to make a project of really digging into it before I can make a new release. I will work on it next thing but I have to cut myself off of SOM so I can get back to working on my 3D modeling project's work.

The underlying controls problem was a problem before too I think, but the changes in this demo kind of helped me to see it, but exacerbates it too. What it boils down to is the climbing code thinks it's climbing pretty much as long as it's not prevented from doing so. Before I think this did have an impact... it resulted from a change I made a little while back... but a small one. Now the climbing code doesn't act instantly but waits until it knows you're not holding down the action button, and that actually makes things easier I think, but it makes the climbing state more important to get correct.

The ducking down motion now happens later, and that puts it in conflict with the squatting motion that happens when climbing into a low-ceiling area or climbing while squatting. The reason is when squatting instead of ducking down (further) you pop up your head. But the way it's implemented is just as an inversion of the height, so you can't invert mid duck. And it doesn't make sense to "pop up" while climbing.

To climb into crawlspaces (whether at ground level or not) you now tap action. (You can't really make this with SOM's stock tiles but you can arrange box objects to create such spaces.) I think that's better actually. But the reason it was done by holding before was both because you can auto-squat while running, which is done by holding, and that lets you choose what to do given an obstacle that's both a platform and a crawlspace. In that case now I think it will take the platform because the clipper always goes as high as it can go. I don't think that's the best default necessarily. Still tapping feels and looks better.

Lastly, this demo has the crosshair and other mouse cursor improvements from the previous reply here, and F12 and the Plus and Minus keys beside it can now access a MASTER VOLUME feature. And don't forget the wall-holding feature itself, that's the real subject of the demo. While working on the cursor stuff I came across a comment dated 2012. Hard to believe it was that long ago.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #11 on:** February 16, 2020, 07:04:47 AM »

Demo Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.14.zip

The demo I uploaded yesterday broke running so that when you stop and stand still it crouched down. I didn't notice. That's for sneaking, which I don't do in testing often. It's also an alternative way to stop without releasing the action button.

EDITED: Writing this gives me the idea of making crouching after running not raise up so that it's a continuous movement. I tested it and it already does that sometimes, but other times not... which certainly shouldn't be the case. It's probably an indication something is awry. Usually there is a delay before raising up... not sure why, but I guess that's a good window to slip in crouching and maybe even other things.

I had to rewire some things as a result and added some embellishments and further fixes: firstly the gauges now deplete, which helps I think to make it clear it's a feature and not a bug; secondly, I noticed it wasn't possible to jump backward, which was because the same movement penalties as running were being applied, which slows backward and sideways. So this is an improvement (I hadn't thought of it) both because it works omnidirectionally like crouching now, but also the sideways penalties were limiting how far you could see out, so afterward you can get a considerably better view around the corner, which was something I was concerned about. It means too you don't have to try so hard to hit the edge of the corner.

As a result of the ability to stretch out further I settled on using the dashing height as the bottomed out height, which I think is ideal anyway. I think that is approximately head height, which is ideal for peeking your head up. That only works if a barrier happens to be shoulder height though.

I'm pretty pleased with these changes.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #12 on:** February 16, 2020, 02:44:26 PM »

Quote from: Holy Diver link=topic=299.msg2791#msg2791

EDITED: Writing this gives me the idea of making crouching after running not raise up so that it's a continuous movement. I tested it and it already does that sometimes, but other times not... which certainly shouldn't be the case. It's probably an indication something is awry. Usually there is a delay before raising up... not sure why, but I guess that's a good window to slip in crouching and maybe even other things.

I looked into this. It turned up a bug in the demo (maybe going way back) that happens if you take off running while entering squat-walk mode from crouching. Running is supposed to return to normal height. I wrote up a fix for it. I left the rest alone. It looks interesting, like taking off from a runner's stance at a starting mark. Maybe it could use some polishing up. (Edited: this is functionally identical to taking off running from a crouch position: because you have to release the button before you can press it to run.)

Likewise I followed-up on going from running to crouching. This wasn't really possible to do cleanly before. It is simple now (though it was pretty involved to fully flesh out) because the jump-detector keeps you dashing for a little while after you let go so the jump speed matches the running speed. It's during this window that you can crouch, and in this case you don't have to let go of the stick to do so. You transition into leaning out. It can work as a fast stop maneuver, that can then jump. If you tap the Action button instead of crouching (holding it) you technically enter a crouch briefly but transition into a squat-walk as normally would happen. It all happens more quickly because when running you're already down the first phase of crouching.

I was going to upload a patch with these changes except I noticed that it wasn't working for the jogging and sneaking modes. I'm not sure why really. I will have to investigate it another day. I'm pretty excited about these developments. I never liked that these actions couldn't be performed while running/sneaking around. I honestly can't remember if I never thought to do it this way or if I've just forgetten that I had. I think having the option to do them either way actually makes them less complicated than having to remember to switch between dashing and walking mode.

It remains possible to do short dashes that bleed the gauges slightly without crouching. To crouch this way you have to have been running for a little while. I think it's twice the time it takes for the gauges to begin draining. That is 383+383 (766) milliseconds by default. This number is actually pretty nailed down these days. I think you want it to be between 375 and 400 which isn't a lot of wiggle room. The default splits the difference.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #13 on:** February 18, 2020, 03:46:12 AM »

Random news: yesterday I was obsessing over this stuff again (can't remember what about exactly) and took to trying to kind of diminish the squat-walking transitional movement. What it looks like is just a function of how I implemented it so that during the transition you are both standing up (from crouching) and squatting down at the same time, so you end up in a middle height...

That's because everything is a continuous function, and when squatting the duck animation is inverted and when standing up the duck animation is basically going in reverse.

So the end result is a little lumpier than I'd like. I think what got me into that investigation was I was/am unhappy with the jarringness of the transition from running to squat-walking that I'm working on. I haven't solved that one just yet.

My idea to smooth it out was to just try to take the curves and somehow make them a less extreme version of themselves. I ended up turning to the spring-system simulation system that I originally developed to smooth out gait transitions. I think last year I applied it to the crouching/leaning effect to improve its experience. I tried to apply it to the squat transition, but could not get satisfying results.

Finally the idea occurred to me to why not just apply it to the eye level animations in general, sense the reason I couldn't get good results was I was trying to isolate it to the squat-transition.

It makes sense to smooth everything out so that they are less mechanical. This kind of smoothing is applied in at least those two places, so maybe I should be looking for other ways to use it, if only to make everything match.

The results are an improvement I think. Taking off to a run from a crouch that I spoke on the other day as needing a little polish automatically got smoothed out by this change.

I'm thinking that the problem with walking up stairs in my King's Field II project that is just a little jarring can be solved this way by implementing some kind of general shock absorbing system. It's not so simple to implement because it needs to be isolated to small shocks so it doesn't come into play when falling. I could just cut it out when falling too.

I'm still finding problems in the demo and working out the known issues for a release. I would like to be able to write a blog post about something for February but my attention is so divided I don't know if it makes sense to. If so I need to release my new 3D software work (that this is detracting from.)

Anytime I do an intense period of work on the movement systems (this is my main area of interest) it always results in great improvements. I call SOM a walk-sim because I feel moving in games is the heart of King's Field games.

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EXIT: There's no place like home

Author Topic: EXIT: There's no place like home (Read 12878 times)

Holey Moley

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simple machines forum

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Sword of Moonlight| Devs| EXIT: There's no place like home

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Sword of Moonlight|

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EXIT: There's no place like home