Topic: STICKY: Random News (Read 87817 times)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #60 on:** June 23, 2020, 03:50:13 AM »

I thought I could find a topic/thread for this post, but alas no... for the record yesterday I FINALLY worked on a strategy to eliminate false positives from the jumping system!

It seems like an improvement. This is actually important but something I kept thinking to myself I would get around to one day or another and never would.

The jumping system has been one of those incomplete things that I would immediately fix if I got wind of someone about to publish a game with SOM. But since nobody has it's not been a huge priority. False positives (accidental jumps) is one of those things that players would be right to not put up with.

How the changes work is to try to tell when the thumb stick is being let go of as opposed to when it's just being moved through the center manually. To do this there is a delay after the jump is inputted to wait and see if the stick lands in the center or crosses over it. This means the jump doesn't happen immediately.

It's programmed to wait 33ms more right now. Anything longer than this is probably going to feel weird (unresponsive, jerky, etc.) so I wasn't sure at first if this strategy would work or not.

I can move the stick around wildly while pressing the dashing button down and releasing it without ever jumping, but I think there is still a chance for unwanted jumps, just a very small one. My attitude toward accidents in games has always been that we have accidents IRL too and so we should embrace them in games and look at them as an opportunity to send us down a different path or just make things interesting from time to time. Hopefully you don't jump to your death, in which case I wish SOM had better features for recovering from that scenario, meaning that in time I will program in more and more safety net features. But right now you just have to suck it up.

EDITED: Big things I still need to do for jumping is to take a look at trigger (analog) buttons since I only added good support for them this year and they're not currently as satisfying for jump inputs as a regular (digital) button, and I think that the direction of the jump should be considering the raw input from the controller somehow instead of using the gait system, which has very low resolution by comparison (between 3 or 4 bits technically speaking.) It will be much better by the end of the year.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #61 on:** July 10, 2020, 03:14:35 AM »

Alt+Alt+V

Holey Moley · « **Reply #62 on:** February 10, 2021, 05:30:00 AM »

Today I worked on the timing for when NPCs show their titles, at 60 fps. There are 4 bytes in the profiles for the frame when the titles should appear. If they're set to 0 (as some are) the title will show at the end of the animation. This is because 1 is the first frame and 0 is never equal in the test.

I've added this to NpcEdit today along with the turning rate setting, on a second page. I've been meaning to publish EneEdit with two pages and this one now. There's nothing in the way really, except I feel like I should do the Japanese versions and publish at the same time. There's also a chance I will change them or discover something new in the meantime.

If someone needs these features by all means ask and you shall receive. I'd like to find out if there's room in NPC profiles to add a turn-table and flight/swim/incline parameters so they can have parity with the new enemy profile feature set.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #63 on:** March 24, 2021, 11:53:41 AM »

A personal note

I haven't worked on SOM the past few days because of (wisdom tooth) dental surgery and my usual trips into town. On the plus side I got a leftover COVID vaccine at the pharmacy, and the second shot is timed for 4wks which is exactly my schedule for driving into town. (I'm not the ideal candidate for an early vaccine, but how could I say no? My mother got hers like two days before retiring because for some reason everyone at the university got one... I still don't understand why university personnel got one and not all teachers.)

The day before I spent most of my time with the PlayStation VR, mainly playing games on the PS4 because I have to plug it into the PS4 when its firmware resets (or something) since it reverts back to being green when that happens. (Something adds a purple filter to counteract the display's greenness. I have some code that adds a purple filter but I disabled it when I found out the PS4 installs one... only to find out it can go away after a little while of using it on Windows.)

Actually I just played one game (Moss) because I was reminded I don't have the magic wand controllers, which I'm not sure I was thinking about when I purchased some VR games on sale, including From Software's game. I ordered a used pair of wands (PlayStation Move) that I guess I can test with the Exselector project I'm going to turn my attention to any day now.

ATM there are three things I'm working on: 1) monster AI, behavior/clipping, 2) new inputs for the attack/magic buttons, and 3) I want to begin peripheral work with Exselector.

I'm using (2) to flesh out the animation infrastructure that (1) heavily relies on. And I want to dig into clipping for monsters because it's unacceptable in its present state. (I don't know if clipping glitches were as pronounced in the original version of SOM or if there's something about the current clipping code that makes it more "spectacular".) The handling of "checkpoints" for monsters is not good, I look forward to overhauling it at the same time I work on supporting layer-based checkpoints. Today I think I'm going to make the new shield system react to NPC clipping and use that opportunity to fix a behavioral problem where at a certain range monsters would automatically become aggressive and switch animations to attack... the problem is it causes animation glitches (maybe when there's no viable attack) so I've disabled it... but I think what it should do instead is make the monster aware of the player... which is not nearly as aggressive, but at least should be stable. I just don't think it makes sense to become aware at a certain distance (or how to determine that distance) so instead doing it as a response to contact (clipping) is what seems to make the most sense.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #64 on:** April 03, 2021, 11:11:00 PM »

Today I made menus sandwich the 3d models between the text and frames so they're no more behind glass. It's a little weird but I think the pros of it outweigh the cons. On the Equip screen it's especially awkward I think to put the equipment models behind the menus. On the other screens they're not as obscured, so it works a little better.

But overall, especially in VR putting the 3D on a back layer is confusing for depth perception cues, and not washing out their colors and having them feel more in your face works out better.

I'm planning to let the analog sticks manipulate the models sometime when it's convenient. It will be at the same time I overhaul how items are interacted with on the ground to be more like King's Field II. Then it will make more sense for them to be in the foreground. It would also be nice to be able to push them into the background if it weren't for the fact the background is paper thin, and even if it wasn't it's not clear how the item would pass through it like a ghost. Time will tell.

Because the arm model is on the same depth buffer layer as the 3d models it now obscures the menus as well. Originally SOM cleared the depth buffer for the arm and 3d models, but this isn't good for performance/stability, so I've segmented the buffer. It's a little quirky but for practical reasons it seems like an easily avoided/ignored matter.

I don't know yet how this will play in VR. It may either look weird or interesting or unsettling. Speaking of VR I played L.A. Noire in VR two nights ago with PlayStation Move controllers for the first time with these controllers. It was a very unusual experience. I have a hard time imagining King's Field as one of these games where you interact with everything with your hands. The main trouble I had with it was with movement since it had no way to move laterally. This is a problem I find in many, many contemporary games, that seems like an oversight or something. If I couldn't move laterally in real-life I'd have to approach everything like I'm a big bus. I wonder if horses have to think in such terms... they tend to only understand forward and backward... which is not good when they're confronted with an obstacle since they tend to just try to plow through things and get themselves hurt. That's what L.A. Noire was like. If you need to look around a column to shoot at mobsters you couldn't just slide over (maybe you could move your body if the PSVR camera's "play area" wasn't so restricted) but have to instead back up like a car, and reverse, and before you know it's like parallel parking. This just seems like a mood killer and a very bad handicap, almost comical. I guess this is "tank controls" but you can't just turn, move, turn, when you're receiving gun fire!

P.S. I will probably try From Software's VR game next, but I've already seen it on YouTube so I know how it works, etc. in full detail, and it's story. It's weirdly like Dark Souls (just let it go FS!) even though the setting seems superficially different. I'll be interested to see what it looks like. Moss looks really nice... sometimes it looks real when the aliasing isn't popping. L.A. Noire didn't look very nice. I'm often surprised how amateur big company games can seem, and how ugly their graphical effects can come across. From Software is known for being a middle tier company, so I'm interested to see what they pull off. Moss's team is middle tier too I think, although it was pulled together from a lot of veterans fleeing big company culture from what I've seen (I got to work with one of its team members since I'm working with PlayStation VR on Windows.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #65 on:** May 08, 2021, 02:43:32 AM »

Unpublished work

I just worked on a nwse_saturation extension that makes the King's Field II style compass easy to adapt to a regular SOM project. This is something I meant to do earlier but completely forgot. It looks like it changes its color but its RGB values are fake: R sets the brightness of any opaque materials, G sets it for translucent materials, and B is an absolute opacity level for translucent materials. The problem with modulating the opacity is these colors can't go above 1.0/255 so to cover the full range you'd be tempted to make your opacity 1.0, but then your material would no longer be detected as transparent and so would not be subject to opacity, so this was just the simplest way. These values can be changed on the fly, mainly in case your lighting is different on different maps.

Other than this it's simple to modify the texture since it's not in the MDO file, it's just in the DATA/MENU folder like anything else. You can also replace the MDO file of course.

Just some things to look forward to. I try to post something when I add anything that could be considered a feature. The reason the 3D compass couldn't be easily used before is KF2 has wildly different colors because it uses a formula to augment it. The compass is still subject to the map lighting, which may not be ideal. I have to figure out a way to specify lighting conditions for individual models at some point (I have a plan of sorts) but there's so many numbers involved in lighting that you can't just feed those into an INI file.

Below is code for how to use this extension after I publish it. do_kf2 currently enables both KF style power gauges and the 3D compass. do_nwse is a way to just enable the compass, although it is a little strange because it dwarfs the SOM style power gauges. I should maybe work on shrinking it down to normal size in that scenario. It's a bit of a novelty for now. I don't know it should work with the do_st (Shadow Tower mode) extension or not since ST doesn't have a compass. (Currently that will probably overlap the magic and compass displays.)

Code: (Ex.ini) [Select]

[Option]
;also want KF style power gauge display?
;do_kf2
do_nwse
[Deatail]
nwse_saturation = id(255,96,128)

For the record, the reason I chose 0~255 values for this is I didn't want to make it 3 extensions or more complicated. This lets it be packed into one extension.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #66 on:** June 01, 2021, 03:44:44 AM »

I've retooled my Patreon introduction and support text to be more inline with how the site works in practice: https://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight

I'm not crazy about how the site makes the page all about me personally but that's the appropriate context in terms of how it works in practice I suppose.

I have to keep everything on it very brief so I can't say very much. Otherwise it clips things and I feel that's not a good look. There's no room to drop support links... it wants to do everything through the big social media sites which I don't use. I'm not ideologically against them, I just can't see myself dealing with them in terms of a pastime or professional obligation. I wish I could include links to my personal sites like this one instead. I.e. without sticking them in the intro text. There's just not room for anything there.

There has been some new members join. It's going to be inconsequential unless it starts following a doubling pattern, i.e. a sharp exponential curve.

P.S. I was in town yesterday. I'm still flailing around trying to settle into a new project in an exploratory phase.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #67 on:** June 05, 2021, 05:19:38 AM »

FWIW I think it's probably come time to let go of Windows XP because I'm setting up a new PC and finding out that Microsoft ended support for Visual Studio 2010 in mid 2020 (only 10yrs for such a major compiler, geez) and so I can't seem to get it to work on a new PC.

Without VS2010 it's not possible to debug software properly. It's still possible to make apps that will work on Windows XP in theory until Microsoft ends VS2017 but that's pretty hopeless because if for some reason they don't work you don't have any development tools to fix them with. So the only practical way to keep supporting Windows XP would be to use something other than Visual Studio and that's just not realistic. Especially if there's no movement to bring XP back to life without Microsoft.

By ending support for it it's possible to start freely using more up-to-date features of C++ but I worry those may run into problems on Vista and Windows 7 and 8 all of which I can't very easily support. I do still have an XP computer and a Windows 10 one with a working install of VS2010, but I it's been a while since I tested SOM with Windows XP and I don't expect to do that. Right now I've all but packed up that Windows XP system (which also has a Windows 7 install) to make space for a new PC. I haven't decided if I will mothball it. It doesn't seem practical to cling to the past without cause.

Strikeout: See next post/reply...

Holey Moley · « **Reply #68 on:** June 06, 2021, 08:13:01 AM »

CORRECTION: I guess I don't understand how Windows Update works because on day 2 it's now offering "me" an update (service pack for VS2010) so I guess it turns out nothing's changed on the XP front and I apologize for a false alarm post. (I installed VS2019 after it, maybe the updates are triggered by installing the newer "visual studio installer" software, I don't know how Windows Update coordinates updates for non-Windows software, etc.)

P.S. I may be spending a little time playing with trying to install MacOS (virtual machine) on Windows 10. I was going to try to do it on a Linux side-boot but searching around it looks like the same software "stack" can work on Windows. (I'm just interested in being able to do basic tests for cross-platform development purposes.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #69 on:** June 14, 2021, 07:09:44 PM »

PayPal

I've added a donation system to the http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/support/ page here. (Edited: I have serious reservations about it. But I don't want to overthink it, everyone uses PayPal nowadays. Mainly I feel like the financial companies should be taking small flat fees out of transcations, not percentages. Or the percentages should be much smaller as the transactions are larger. It looks overgenerous to PayPal to give them 30$ of every $1000 that trades hands.)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #70 on:** June 17, 2021, 11:01:06 PM »

I think somewhere around here (I can't find it) I expressed hesitancy to buy a new VR kit to develop with because I didn't see the controllers that came with it as viable for playing games with SOM... because they only have one index finger button. Update: I think I may not have seen the big "grip" button that's visible on the side of these controllers in some images. I guess maybe it didn't come up in articles about it because people are more interested in how the controllers have the track pad removed compared to the other WMR controllers before it. I still haven't found a picture of the trigger button or from behind the controller.

Anyway, I think this can be enough to work with. If not I was thinking since when you run in the game you duck down some, and when you crouch you duck down more, that maybe dropping your head or arms low could control dashing and crouching.

Also, again I feel like I mentioned this before, but can't find it: I'm thinking about getting the set (HP Reverb G2) before I can get a graphics card for it in the hopes it will work with my integrated graphics enough to play my KF2 project. I can't get the card because there's a global shortage on them. So maybe I'll be working on this before long. I have reason to believe it will work. It will work at least to some degree no matter what, so I could still lay some of the programming groundwork before I can get a card if it comes to that.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #71 on:** July 14, 2021, 04:29:37 AM »

Here's something interesting from the past week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_3D_Engine
https://github.com/o3de/o3de
https://o3d.foundation
https://o3de.org

It's a fully noncommercial game engine under the Linux Foundation (Microsoft and lots of other big companies) with Apache license. It's based on a defunct Amazon engine that was in turn based on CryEngine. So maybe it works with game consoles, but even with Unreal the console parts are withheld, so maybe not. If it's modular maybe in the future I could rig something up to make SOM work with it in some modes if that looks promising. There's many things I wouldn't care to work on with SOM that I wouldn't be opposed to plugging into a fully noncommercial system.

Quote from: Edited: https://www.technewsworld.com/story/87189.html

The most significant factor of O3DE is that the engine has been completely re-architected from the ground up as a modular system. This non-monolithic approach means that game developers can use what they want as plugins, according to LF.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #72 on:** August 03, 2021, 06:31:16 AM »

Here's another interesting noncommercial game engine project I could see SOM potentially using someday towards more realistic effects.

http://diligentgraphics.com/diligent-engine/

Holey Moley · « **Reply #73 on:** December 23, 2021, 01:45:12 PM »

New feature idea

This is an uncategorized idea I had. I think I will implement this any day now...

In the PlayStation days, and probably KFIV too, when you pick up an item off the field, etc. From Software chose to do something unique, in that it doesn't generate even a name for the item to tell you what it's called. There's no menu, etc.

SOM takes a different tack here by showing a normal menu with the name clearly displayed. I wonder why the classic games never went this route? For my KFII project I want to go back to the original style. I realized yesterday there's a good way to do this...

In the Options screen there's a fourth option that seems ill-fated, out of place. What it does is hide item visuals in the Use Item and Equip menus. I guess for faster browsing through them, it will just show text. This seems like something that no one (today) would want to ever turn on so it's just kind of this vestigial thing (clearly SOM's developer(s) felt it made sense in 2000.)

Instead my plan is to convert it into an option to choose to hide the menu/text when picking up items. I think it might be a nice compromise to flash the item's name in the "lower third" the same way "gold" flashes the amount picked up. That seems harmless, but I suppose I could add a hard core Ex.ini extension to even not show this.

Anyway, this option should also have a key binding, and I may build one into the menu so the text/menu can be toggled on and off with a spare button. Toggling it on will show the entire Yes/No menu and name of the item via its prompt. So this way players can be put in control of this for any game, so games won't have to decide on a style for themselves.

EDITED: Another reason I'm keen on this is just to get the out-of-place option out of the Options menu since it's kind of weird and so contributes to a sense of a game being incompetent or cobbled together. So far the menus are something I've not made much headway into. I want to replace the system stuff with Exselector, but would like the game menu to stay and be fully customizable some day.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #74 on:** January 16, 2022, 04:45:52 PM »

follow-up

I found myself doing a small project at the end of the day from the previous reply in this topic/thread about converting a useless option into a way to get classic KF style experience when examining items. I just laid down the basics. I still have to work on animating the item transition and manipulating it with the controller to call it finished.

But something really weird I discovered is the third toggle option that hides items in menus doesn't actually prevent the model files from being loaded up. That's really weird because I assumed its purpose was to speed up the menus. And I was surprised it even hides items from the pick up screen... which is doubly bizarre since they completely disappear from the scene before appearing in the menu display, so that with this option enabled (or technically off) it looks as if the object (item) has disappeared entirely from the game.

I hope I can find time to mess around with this more before long but it's good either way to be rid of that funky option in the meantime. I have set up a button toggle to turn the menu on and off with the triangle button or J key, but it only works when examining items outside of menus. I'm thinking about having the other button show text, but the menu shows the name too, so it can be used to reveal the name briefly before taking the item.

Edited: Oh yeah, for the default English I called it "Examine Display" and I'm thinking of leaving the Japanese alone since it calls it Item Display (in Japanese) which seems close enough to the meaning.

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Holey Moley

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simple machines forum

News:

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

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Sword of Moonlight|

Archive (pre 2023)|

Beginner and other Nonsense|

STICKY: Random News