Topic: Moratheia (Read 42633 times)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #15 on:** July 08, 2019, 08:10:40 PM »

Dark as ever

Holey Moley · « **Reply #16 on:** December 21, 2019, 05:36:16 AM »

Two of Verdite's music sharing accounts I found today while putting Moratheia into search engines:

https://soundcloud.com/moratheia
https://soundcloud.com/rathmor

I recognize some tracks from the demo here. I feel like it's been a long time since I heard of Moratheia last, but it looks like the last contact was July of this year, so it's not really that long ago. I haven't got much done myself (without a day job) in the same amount of time. Or at least not that I can recall or not that I can show for myself.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #17 on:** May 26, 2020, 03:03:49 PM »

Here's an old/new shot from the "Moratheia 2.1" demo. I think this is my favorite shot in a SOM game so far. It's very cinematic/photogenic. I usually criticize Ben's game for being too dark, because I can't see it on my monitor, but I don't know if he's intentionally aiming for these kinds of deep dark scenes or if it's just by accident this scene turns out this way. It's the first house you're likely to visit in this demo.

I'm resharing it to show off a new do_sharp effect, that adds a degree of hitherto unseen sharpness that rivals commercial games that use oppressive image-based antialiasing techniques (that kill your frame rate and won't work on budget systems.) The effect is lost more to still images than the old one. The full effect must be seen in motion.

The new technique is stupidly simple, it just replaces one of the halftone images with an unfiltered image. That's why you see halos that can be up to two pixels. But in motion they are changing every frame and your eye blends them together so you don't seem them as halos.

It looks good enough in game to be worth ditching the old double half-tone image that was too blurry. You can see it in some of the screenshots here, except many of them are dithered shots. I used to really like the dithered/stippled effect, but the new effects have come a long way, and I haven't been able to use the dither/stipple effects personally for a long time because my recent monitors are too fat in the pixel dept. Dither only looks good if you can't discern individual pixels from a distance. The market for monitors has plummeted until there are only like two bare bones monitors at the stores. Samsung doesn't even make monitors that you can plug in and configure two separate inputs for. It's weird how we are going backward with the march of time.

Edited: For the record I haven't heard from Moratheia's author in a very long time, or what seems like a long time to me anyway. He actually made a post in here a while back, in this sub-board, but he didn't hang around after, which is pretty ****ing typical of him.

Update: For the record, by crazy coincidence I overturned this effect the very next day, so this reply/image is not representative of anything. There was nothing wrong with it, but it turned out the problem it was meant to solve never should have existed. See the next reply for details.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #18 on:** June 08, 2020, 06:11:03 AM »

These are new screens I'm attaching in order to be able to link to elsewhere. They actually have a better version of "do_aa" than in the previous post because I inexplicably found out the very next day that the old effect was actually hobbled by not being shifted over by half a pixel (https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/gtcp6t/more_good_news_for_sword_of_moonlight_visuals/) so I've reverted back to the old effect, and have added a complementary effect that works on the textures, which is what these images are really meant to showcase.

This new effect came about because I wanted to use cutouts (colorkey) for the letters on the King's Field II style 3D compass, however the text wasn't good enough, forcing me to consider options.

In these screens the trees and grasses are cutouts, except for the tree trunks, and the new sharper formulation is on display. The closeup on a single blade of grass is actually stronger than the final setting I went with, that had to be more conservative if it was going to be used in the menus. I think I will probably change the blit and/or sprite shaders to lessen the effect so it can be stronger. The idea just occurred to me.

I only just enabled it for UI elements today. You can see that in the screenshot too. I didn't want it to be visually detectable in the UI elements so I scaled it back. But these screens are already taken. You don't get the full effect in a screenshot anyway, and the texture effect as-is is less attractive in screenshots because I made it to spread over an equilateral triangle so that every side is as diagonal as possible.

I've written about it elsewhere already, and I'm about to publish a patch with links to these images. And I'm going to share them with a CMAA author who I've contacted to try to help me to replace the MLAA system with CMAA since it's so much better now. These are algorithms for converting the 1bit cutout mask to an antialiased mask. If I'm really lucky they may even take on this novel technique to give it a technical paper like they have for Intel.

Verdite · « **Reply #19 on:** August 16, 2020, 02:25:05 PM »

Sorry that I missed these. They look amazing.
Sadly, I haven't much news to post in this Moratheia board. As always, I crave and miss my project, but life takes the stern and very often leaves me with no time left to work on it.

EDIT: Thanks for the comment about my game being dark. I always strive to create scenes with atmosphere and mood. Sometimes it isn't easy with SoM.
With the houses, my initial idea upon reviewing them a while ago was to close them down and add more detail instead of roomy space. But after seeing your comment, I'm pleased we share the same idea. The large spaces give a much colder and atmospheric vibe.

I hope to get back soon with some news or information.
Verdite

Holey Moley · « **Reply #20 on:** August 18, 2020, 07:24:57 AM »

I'm working on arm stuff right now and the modeling tools and conversion programs are a lot better lately since I've been having to do modeling work. I figured out why your models were all body parts piled on top of 0,0,0 ... although it saddens me that I think you probably worked with SOM_MAP like that even though I gave you a way to fix it. But now it doesn't have to be fixed, but I haven't published the new tools, since I'm heavily working on them, but I can give you rushes if you were interested.

In the last two days I've been looking at KF2's music/sound stuff mainly so I can get the sound the weapons make. I found out MIDI playback on Windows is pretty much a joke (I really thought MIDI files would be linked to sound bank files) but I had an idea that SOM is already a MIDI player, it just needs to play the samples like regular screeches (sound effects) at the right time. In fact a decade ago I programmed a piano into it to test the sound effects fix I devised, so I'm coming back full circle.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #21 on:** August 22, 2020, 04:03:46 AM »

I noticed do_sounds is missing from my Moratheia Ex.ini file. I guess I never included it or deleted it. I was a adding a new do_reverb extension when I noticed. Did you ever run into problems with sound dropping out? Unless I recently removed it I've never noticed sound drop out. (My guess is you avoided adding sound sources to make it work without extensions.)

I'm thinking that do_sounds should probably be retired and replaced with a Bugfix extension.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #22 on:** April 13, 2022, 08:39:27 AM »

I've added a not about fixing trip zones for this old project with the current patch explained here (
http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=330.msg3335#msg3335) and I think I'll upload my Ex.ini file to the OP in case it's any help.

simple machines forum

News:

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Moratheia

Author Topic: Moratheia (Read 42633 times)

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Verdite

Verdite says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

Holey Moley

Holey Moley says,

simple machines forum

News:

Sword of Moonlight| Demos| Moratheia

Author Topic: Moratheia (Read 42633 times)

Sword of Moonlight|

Demos|

Moratheia