For a very long time I’ve pursued a side project of developing art productivity software to support Sword of Moonlight. For many years I’ve worked on developing COLLADA as a format for storing “3D” art for use by game projects.

Since mid-to-early last year I’ve been busy developing an actual application for artists to use in place of popular 3D modeling packages like Blender. That’s taken up most of my time, and I was doing it in preparation to work on my personal game project to port King’s Field II to Sword of Moonlight.

Continued: Making "modeling" software

I’ve prepared a new release in 3 days flat, and am rushing it out to make this January 31 blog post.

I am very eager to work on Sword of Moonlight again. I’ve been absent since mid December, working on various things, some tangential to Sword of Moonlight, but mostly I’ve been very frustrated, feeling as if I was not being productive, whether or not I have been, the feeling persisted. Ostensibly I was working on a difficult problem to do with writing XML like documents and accoutrements to ZIP archives, within a framework of my own devising that is — as it turns out — perhaps too transparent for its own good. I cannot say why that work drug itself out for so long, other than it’s highly conceptual and because it was in service of a “software library” its bar is much higher than Sword of Moonlight’s. Adding insult to injury is the feature itself is more a logical gap than a pressing matter — no one really needs it, but logically it should be part of the feature set. It’s refreshing to be able to turn out a new and important feature in 3 days in comparison.

Continued: Back!

Lately I’ve felt I’m burning out on COLLADA-DOM and so I’ve at least temporarily turned my attention back to Sword of Moonlight. My return so far proceeds on two fronts — or three if you count the slew of issues seemingly brought about by the Windows 10 Creator Update:

Front 1 is the King’s Field II port. I’m beginning by surveying Melanat, made with SOM_MAP, accurate to the King’s Field in-game maps. This is something I’d want to do myself even if there was an easier way. I’ve done some tests and will soon add an image overlay feature to SOM_MAP.

Front 2 is to make technical changes to From Software’s artwork, so it is compatible with extensions I developed in 2015 that enable Sword of Moonlight to conjure perfectly straight lines without “anti-aliasing” perfect for the stark geometric shapes of the original PlayStation games. This was the first practical objective I had in mind for Daedalus. It still is.

I’ve web searched the landscape in vain. I’ve concluded developing a new editing software is unavoidable. It’s not the only way, but it’s the only way that doesn’t make me uncomfortable.

I’ve settled on borrowing from a modest open source project called Misfit Model 3D. In order to carry out software, programmers methodically pore over problem domains, and this is the molten core value of a baseline competent code base. By carrying this effort over into Daedalus I sidestep having to do that myself (up to a point) and am liberated to be more creative and less necessitous. While I feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel this time, I’m also feeling positive about this arrangement, even if it is just an instinct.

In July I inadvertently preoccupied myself porting COLLADA-DOM (2.5) to POSIX environments: Cygwin; and then Linux on Windows 10. I used CMake to do this. I’d never used CMake. It doesn’t have a precompiled-header framework. COLLADA-DOM requires one. So I developed one.

The software demonstration from last month now has a location bar and downloads a graphic from this website if opened to a blank document.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/ColladaDOM_3_Reference_Viewer.zip

The new graphic demonstrates an experimental sRGB mode and also in this file I devised a way to extend COLLADA’s Common Profile to be able to represent Sword of Moonlight’s material values. This was a major stumbling block when I first approach Sword of Moonlight via COLLADA.

The location bar uses a UI code base that I settled on earlier in June called GLUI. I’ve added “copy & paste” to it. I did so for Unix like environments also, but am still working on a full non-Windows version as I speak. I’ve had good relations with Nigel who develops GLUI. I would like to develop it alongside the Daedalus project to complement Sword of Moonlight with art creation tools. I’m uncertain what the future holds. I know that this is destiny, but the way Nigel works is too counterproductive, so unless I can insinuate my values into the GLUI effort it will have to be reconstituted into a sister project that can develop at a brisker pace. I’ve enjoyed myself, but I must live at the speed of mere mortals.

It’s deadline time again. All I can manage, again, is a follow-up to April’s post.

Here is a link from some time ago in the forums that leads to a new graphical application that visualizes COLLADA’s XML resources. It works much as a web browser displays a web page.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/ColladaDOM_3_Reference_Viewer.zip

I am keeping it up-to-date with new capabilities as they come online. There are sample files and keyboard and mouse usage instructions to be had in the following link.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=234.msg2253#msg2253

In May I could hardly recall where I spent my time, except that in the previous week I’ve worked extensively on the “FX” part of the application in preparation for taking it beyond the confines of Nvidia’s Cg API that was part of an initiative for the PlayStation 3 but is now gathering cobwebs; Only in the last weeks while I was working on it Nvidia took down its online documentation.

In the week prior I decided to apply myself to nooks and crannies: working on nonlinear curve design and its application to 3-D animation.

Finally I was able to recall the earlier part of the month. In that time I believe I hit upon a practical way to incorporate the newer of COLLADA’s two XML schemas (1.5.0) into the software; Which was a first.

Continued: ColladaDOM 3 Reference Viewer