Topic: STICKY: Random News (Read 87816 times)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #45 on:** January 04, 2016, 11:24:02 PM »

I've decided to change up my Patreon page for Sword of Moonlight at:

https://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight

I'm sorry if the new direction is off-putting, but I'm making some bold decisions, and I expect things to get pretty weird.

The main reason is I don't think the appeal to video-game history is ever going to attract anyone, if it hasn't already. I've been pretty shameless about plugging the Patreon since I set it up, and chose a very click-bait name for the account (in lieu of my own name) just to get people to click on my profile. Patreon is not known to be effective for projects that are not already well underway, but I don't think even after SOM goes into Beta and I drop a SOM version of King's Field 2 that it will make a big difference at that time, if it hasn't already drawn some interest. But the only reason the site is there really is to hold down the URL and not get caught flatfooted.

Second many Patreon accounts have alternative layouts, that it seems like Patreon just assigns at random, essentially using the account holders as human guinea-pigs. This layout looks like it's probably going to replace the original layout for everyone at some point. And it requires a big backdrop image, which I just cannot provide now or likely ever. It seems I could not be more different from most of the artists represented on Patreon. I don't know if that will be good for SOM or not, but realistically the artists on Patreon seem like horrible fits for something with the scope and grandeur that SOM seems to imply. So my out-of-place-ness may be more appropriate than not.

Since I cannot come up with any imagery that I feel is befitting of SOM. I've had an idea for a while of somehow wrapping SOM in Derek Jarman's final film Blue. It's a bizarre fit given the history of video games, but I want to be aspirational, I want to invoke video game future. Or 3D future. I'm also inclined to stop using the video game word. I feel pretty comfortable with just "3D". Especially since with the new consumer VR glasses poised to appear like cellphones did around the turn of the century, I think 3D is going to just implicitly mean "realtime 3D" by default.

The film Blue is like a paean to the color blue. So I want it to cross over creating the sensation of worlds colliding with our own, dissolving the boundaries of 3D and art and virtual worlds, this is part of my process, that I call extreme-3D. Or that's when intentionally the fourth wall is pierced by the 3D artifice.

Blue also has lots of imagery that feels befitting the in-universe legend of the Moonlight Sword, and even a battle sequence with the "yellow goblin" that is evocative of something from a fantasy video game. The entire film is a blue screen, as if to say this is complete blue, as blue as it gets, obviously the blue in this context is code for the Moonlight Sword itself, or the "blue light", as described by in-universe legends.

This part is sung:

Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it Blue is darkness made visible

[edited: I also read somewhere these lines are taken or derived from a book the artist wrote called Chroma, which is just more private meditation on colors, including the color blue. To me it's very evocative of King's Field. You can see why, although only vaguely; as is appropriate in these things. I think there's a general consensus that creativity is mostly the ability/discipline to associate freely between things, real or imagined, in order to exploit them. If anything creativity should represent the arts. I don't think this is a controversial statement.]

Other parts are more complicated, as Derek Jarman made this film while dying of AIDS as a gay man. I think it was debuted on one of the original BBC channels. So it is perhaps a prestigious film, although I do not know the historical context. I do not know if the film was shown in any theaters before this, of if its primary experience was that of a blue television screen, as is often the default color of many old televisions and VCRs. It's this flat blue screen that I intend to use as a backdrop, even though eventually it will doubtful be in the shape of a television screen, but I hope that if you see Blue or try to sit through it, you'll at least get the picture that it's intended to represent SOM symbolically and absolutely as a transcendental force or element of nature.

I am absolutely comfortable with this. I think its time that "video games" flirted with actual art. And I think that King's Field is actually an adult series, truly adult, and not "rated M for mature" and this is fitting. I slightly worry what From Software would think, internally, but they should be impotent to do anything about this regardless I'd think.

I am not too concerned about scaring away potential juvenile game authors. I think the world is becoming more sophisticated at a rapid pace, and this kind of content will not make anyone blush or bat an eyelash if not tomorrow then very soon. It might offend some religious sensibilities in small circles, but it's already about a game with very pagan and heretical themes. I think more offensive would be what I intend to do with King's Field going forward. Which is going to heavily mix in vampires and themes of Christianity, but only because these things have won the global lottery, of what is emblematic of humanity in the here and now, and not too mundane for this kind of popular series that can eventually go toe to toe with the likes of Star Wars. I want KF to be very much ground in the humanity and history here on planet Earth.

I am going to play on the acronym VR. Instead of Virtual Reality, I want to call what SOM is for Virtual Reincarnation. Or VR+intimate storytelling. It's going to be interesting, and hopefully shorter and sweeter than my history of SOM. Still I have to write it. It's going to get weird. You have my apologies. I value art that is vital, bold, and anything but almost has the opposite effect on me anymore. The world is overflowing with media right now. If it is not vital, perhaps we can do without it. There is really so much to spare. I seriously doubt anyone will care about most of the video games of today a century from now. Perhaps only a handful as representative of an era, like the few earliest films that survive in modest rotation. History is written by the victors, and it's difficult to realistically see the video games of today claiming victory over anything.

PS/EDITED: I do feel mildly uncomfortable appropriating Derek Jarman's work, but I feel like it's for the greater good, and art is meant to be reinserted into new art going forward. Just as movies have soundtracks with preexisting compositions, and for that matter may feature images of every form of art imaginable, 3D incarnated art is just poised to take this to the next logical leap. The fact that Derek Jarman made Blue while dying and going blind also mildly plays into the theme or reincarnation, and it's a conceit that I expect to employ in King's Field 9, the final episode in the main trilogy of trilogies. But of course I do not mean literal reincarnation. Just reincarnation into something like a video game protagonist. But in fact scientists may even discover ways to make us forget who we are for a moment, by whatever means our dreams accomplish this, and so SOM could easily be a vector for such technology, just as it can be a vector for VR glasses, etc.

EDITED: Speak of the devil, I just received an email announcing this layout change, minutes after writing this.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #46 on:** January 09, 2016, 06:55:53 AM »

Update: I rewrote my Patreon brochure today, among other things:

https://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight

I've tried to make it more warm and highlight the most interesting things in a way that feels a lot like non sequiturs. Unfortunately it cannot really descend into anything interesting, so I hope "unparalleled virtual reincarnation" is evocative of what SOM is.

I am surprised I never made a thread about the Patreon page. Or if I did, I'm not sure where it is. Maybe it was a blog post. I'd like to move these two posts to it if so. But maybe not if it's an old blog post. Anyway, enjoy the read, and consider joining Patreon/supporting my work with money!?!?!?!

PS: I intend to leave the page this way. I know it seems like it could use some pictures, but I don't think it needs them, and I am thinking about the coming layout change. It doesn't really have an about page, or anything, so my plan is to just not keep a Creator blog, so there is just this pitch, and maybe a Bio post below it (what's currently in the left panel.) And then have any pictures or anything in the Patron's wall. Which I don't know if I can post to or not as the Creator. It may be up to Patrons to run the show! Wouldn't that be a nice act of all-for-1, 1-for-all.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #47 on:** April 22, 2016, 03:09:20 AM »

Lots of pre-production Shadow of the Colossus images, including "8 unused Colossi":

http://nomads-sotc-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/unusedbeta-colossi.html

I think SOTC is one of my main inspirations for developing Sword of Moonlight. I do not know how I would feel if not for this work. Video games have been so very barren. This is an edifice that somehow stands erect like a colossus tent pole, keeping the floating world of video games from collapsing in on itself for me.

I imagine the new King's Field games will be a lot like this. Except free for air to really pass through their halls for all time...

Holey Moley · « **Reply #48 on:** May 03, 2016, 03:42:40 PM »

Speaking of SOTC, here (https://killscreen.com/articles/think-games-are-ready-to-sit-beside-other-forms-of/) is an article that sums up my assessment of video games for the most part, and why I do not consider my work here to be obscure or something like a pipe-dream (although it may be a little bit quixotic, I honestly think it's one of our best bets.)

Here are some of the follow-up links:
https://killscreen.com/articles/should-game-designers-care-about-putting-their-name-on/
http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2011/11/redacted-the-dominant-cultural-form-of-the-21st-century.html

And link from the page that brought me to this old article:

http://shmuplations.com/ueda/

This is recently translated to English I think.

I haven't read all of these. I probably will.

EDITED: I found this (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-video-game-art-of-fumito-ueda) one, which may've prompted the whole thing up to the last link to be good too, especially toward the end (the rest is a bit de rigueur.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #49 on:** June 03, 2016, 04:15:11 PM »

God I wish someone would do something interesting with SOM! I feel like I'm about to lose my mind if something doesn't happen soon

Holey Moley · « **Reply #50 on:** September 26, 2016, 01:03:25 AM »

Here's some thoughts on VGs courtesy Kill Screen's "Weekend Reading" links:

http://reallifemag.com/the-parallax-view/

Quote

Rending beauty from machinery in this way reframes aesthetics as an authoritative deployment of industrial waste, the accumulation of decades of competition among companies trying to distinguish their products from one another with computational imagery that is never more than a few months away from being outmoded.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #51 on:** December 18, 2016, 03:03:56 AM »

Here's the annual SOM status report on GameFAQs:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/958393-sword-of-moonlight-kings-field-making-tool/74735366

I feel like SOM's completely disappearing off the radar. I don't all that much care that no one cares about SOM. I never have. It doesn't change anything for me really; or it shouldn't.

It probably doesn't hurt that my mood is very much slipping off the radar. "2016" has made me very much feel like I just want to avoid as much of humanity as possible for as long as possible...

I fully believe at some date I will emerge victorious from all of this... even if we're all so far up our own *******s by then that no one takes notice.

I have not heard a peep from Verdite. I fully assume he's quietly dropped SOM like a bad habit. Or I finally made an impression on him.

People disregard me and my works as much as ever. I think I've resigned myself to the belief that that's just how the world works (news flash: It mostly doesn't work. It's a human world after all.)

Merry Christmas. The COLLADA-DOM stuff is going swimmingly. I've achieved all of my design goals for it, and am just doing very fine finishing touches at this stage. I will get a front page post up with a near complete review version of the library accompanying it.

I think I've fallen just short of achieving something impactful for Sword of Moonlight before the end of the year. It looks like I will just barely finalize the most elementary form of the new COLLADA-DOM library before the end of the year.

There's no time to think of how to apply it to Sword of Moonlight's problems. That's largely theoretical to be honest. Right now I am just trying to establish a pathway for maintaining competent COLLADA software.

I feel like Sword of Moonlight has lost a year; but it's important work, and it has to be done in order to do anything much less so to carry on.

SOM has already come a great distance. It's so refined that it can stand to lose a year. It's unfortunate that there's no human in our midst fit to be its champion. No matter. Great things have all of the time in the world to wait.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #52 on:** August 29, 2017, 08:57:48 AM »

The last 2 days or so I've compiled all of SOM's textures into new BMP folders. There was already such folders in the ITEM and OBJ folders. And I made some for the MAP textures. And I did the NPC, ENEMY, and SFX ones while at it. And even some of the odd images haunting SOM that seem to have no place among its files.

I'm sure I missed some though. Of the odd ones; Not associated with PRF or PRT files, nor in the SFX models.

Anyway, they are already in the SVN Update files. I want to get a pristine set in before alterations commence.

P.S. I lost a lot of time grappling with software bugs. It wasn't until the very end, the home stretch, where about 25 of the SFX models remained. I actually used From Software's little auxiliary programs to get at most of them. I don't think I'd ever used NpcEdit before. I thought it was very charming. Especially with the names changed to be the names of the King's Fields characters, etc. and not the unmemorable "Man (2)" style names From Software chose. I wish SOM_PRM and SOM_MAP had posed the character models like so. The lighting is not flattering but it helps identify deficiencies in the models I think.

I used tricks to speed the process along, and get at the SFX files via NpcEdit. I've decided to copy the MSM models across the 4 additional nearly identical sets by hand, the same way. I found it very meditative. I forget how it is like that to do these long data-entry style tasks; and those bugs have made me programming software adverse until I can shake the dread. (The worst I left unresolved. I tried to build the JSOM project with Windows with a new thing called vcpkg and it uses a mix of file-handle types, which seems to play havoc with Microsoft's C runtime implementation; and it just seems unworkable and aggravating that the C runtime should have such basic problems. But it can always be something much weirder with software; if memory is corrupted, random stuff happens.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #53 on:** October 22, 2017, 04:42:03 AM »

As soon as I find my way back to SOM I've made a note ~~to try~~ to get the aspect-ratio on images right. I've double underlined this. Not that I haven't tried before. I really have no idea why this problem never shakes out...

Lately I've been preferring a fairly square Resolution setting. Wide screen be damned, I seem to just prefer the more tunnel vision image. I actually think that the smaller the image is in your field of vision the easier it is to get lost in. Ironic.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #54 on:** December 24, 2017, 08:34:05 AM »

Here's a probable source for Tzedek's name. I think it's a surname.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melchizedek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzadik

I think the water magician in the first game (KF) is probably named Cherubim or Keruvim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherub

Currently the DATA language package is using Tsedek. I guess I just guessed at it. Pretty close. I will change it to Tzedek.

I chose Kelvim for the other guy, since I was trying to use real people's names, but maybe in light of this Keruvim is a better guess.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #55 on:** January 24, 2018, 02:12:12 AM »

I'm >this< close to finding my back to working on SOM. I've been banging my head against a brick wall for weeks. (Below is a link to a status update.)

https://sourceforge.net/p/collada-dom/discussion/531263/thread/acb5c945/#f709

I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything lately. I hope when I get back to SOM I will be reinvigorated. I don't feel like my work has been sluggish. But I do feel like at this rate it will be a wonder if I ever accomplish any wide goals. Mostly I feel exhausted

January 28 Update: Finished!

EDITED/P.S. Oh yes. As long as I'm posting, the other day I decided to try to set up a new forum for SOM on a website called Reddit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/7rsudb/sword_of_moonlight_subreddit/ )

I don't use Reddit and I rarely find information in it (via links) but I've got the impression that it's probably the place to park a vanilla as possible forum. I thought that there should be a neutral forum that is hosted by a big ass Silicon Valley company in an as highly visible and trustworthy place as possible. Something that can deal with gluts of spam and traffic and is not intimidating; A first circle of hell if you will.

I was going to make a blog post about the new forum, but I had to make an account and it doesn't have the ability to make a "subreddit." I think probably it must wait for 30 days and I hope that the little points I can wrack up from the above post/link will be enough to let the account make a SOM forum.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #56 on:** June 27, 2018, 07:33:14 PM »

This morning I finally added transparent NPCs (edited: yes, monsters too) to the do_red+do_hit extensions so that they flash red when hit. It was last October when this extension was added. I guess in the meantime there's been little imperative to complete it.

For the record, this will be in the next demo/release/patch but isn't public yet.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #57 on:** July 05, 2018, 09:37:09 AM »

I mistranslated the Missile Shield (green) and Refuge (blue) screen effects magic profiles. I got them reversed. Maybe I was thinking RGB order, but they are RBG. I was probably very thorough, but even still these things seem to happen to me all the time... always getting things reversed, I guess maybe that is dyslexia. But I don't know, I read just fine.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/swordofmoonlight.com/text/English/ has an updated Default.zip file, and the DATA/MY/PROF files are updated with Japanese text.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #58 on:** November 01, 2018, 12:25:07 PM »

I just removed an annoying habit SOM_PRM has of reading/writing Sys.dat. I don't know why SOM_PRM is so destructive about ancillary files. The upside is minuscule to nonexistent, whereas the downside is infuriating.

What it seems to be doing is removing items from the starting inventory, maybe when they are removed, but I think anytime they are modified! Likewise it's deleting entries from the magic table. Other things I addressed earlier in the year, is the annoying habit of removing sword magic assignments, simply because the assigned magic is modified...

This seems to be applying the same logic video games have of forbidding "cheating" to the degree of hamstringing the audience, only to the author themself! Perhaps in an overzealous attempt to mitigate unforeseen glitches.

At any rate, if this has ever driven you crazy, rest assured it's fixed in the next update.

P.S. Oh yeah, sometimes it wipes the inventory out completely. I don't quite understand what those conditions are. It should no longer matter. But it's really weird when you give yourself 1 of every item, go in the game for a test, come out, modify said items in SOM_PRM, go back in the game, and the inventory is fully emptied! It's hard to imagine what's really happening there.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #59 on:** June 13, 2020, 05:57:36 AM »

I haven't had an excuse to use this topic/thread in a while, but just for the record, today I found myself working on a new extension feature to add black masks around the game view, probably limited to full screen mode.

The rationale for it has to do with something called "back-light bleed" that isn't always visible on monitors but tends to be very visible on first person video games like anything that just kind of sticks to the screen when you move around.

I probably should've just figured out a way to augment the resolution (not being able to directly control the resolution menu is kind of anachronism to begin with) and use the black backing "window" to fill in the space, but instead so not disturb that I went ahead and used an existing system that originally was mainly only used to enlarge SOM's title screens that are stuck in 640 x 480 normally.

I think the system is used in dedicated full screen mode also but that's pretty well a thing of the past today.

One side effect of doing this way is the "function overlay" stuff can actually exist in the mask area. I will probably add an option to keep it out of the mask area too in case it's unwanted there. That is to say the mask area is actually part of the allocated resolution. Though by default it will be traded off with the black backing window margin.

My use case for it is the 1050 resolutions have 15 pixels on the top and bottom on a 1080 screen but my back light is still visible on the bottom half, so I notice it, and the next available resolution is 900, which sacrifices 180 pixels, which seems excessive. I could use a custom resolution in the INI file, but that's only temporary if you change resolutions, and it would be symmetrical, whereas my issue is on the bottom only.

With this system you can just tell it to make room for your crappy back-light. I wonder how many games support this kind of thing?

For the record it was a good amount of work to implement since it really pushes the existing system to its limits. I had to fix a lot of things that didn't work. And those are things that probably wouldn't have worked if you tried to actually use the old dedicated full screen mode today (which I don't recommend.)

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simple machines forum

News:

Sword of Moonlight| Archive (pre 2023)| Beginner and other Nonsense| STICKY: Random News

Author Topic: STICKY: Random News (Read 87816 times)

Sword of Moonlight|

Archive (pre 2023)|

Beginner and other Nonsense|

STICKY: Random News