I’m happy to announce 2 new releases have been published. The current release is a foray into opening up Sword of Moonlight’s SFX system to tinkering and sharing. The previous release went unannounced, but I just want to add that it adds a new kind of animation called skin or weight animation, that allows for animation that is somewhere in between the two other animation types, by combining skeleton based animation with the appearance of soft or continuous skin, instead of hard body parts that do not deform.

To “democratize” the SFX system, there is now a DATA/SFX/PROF folder with a new kind of profile that represents a single entry in the classical SFX.DAT table. In addition these profiles can assign models and sound effects (only primaries) that aren’t restricted to 4 digit file names. There aren’t any new features added other than to hopefully make it possible to design SFX profiles and share them and use custom file names for this purpose. Finally a new SFX.DAT table is generated, and stored in your PARAM folder, along with an SFX.PRO file that contains these extended file names.

Continued: SFX and weighted skeletal animation

I kid with my schizophrenia that we do “shadow work” and “light work”, meaning I feel like my brain is a nursery school for pod people, implications unknown. These sound like Jungian and New Age terms, but shadow work can also mean things like homemaking (unpaid labor) or anything we do for commercial companies on our own behalf in order to save them the expense. Light work just means I try to not work too hard. I.e. lightly.

I haven’t been blogging here enough. Everything in my life is complicated and grueling now. I can’t remember what all is in the latest release of SomEx here, but I know it has animated shadows for NPCs now. And I’ve just worked on a patch that shows elements in SOM_MAP’s main screen, and it will let you copy/paste and rotate them from that screen, with full, unlimited undo support. I’ll try to remember more things in the forum.

Schizophrenia has been making everything in my life twice as hard for about 1.5 years now. I’m sorry to apologize for my infrequent blog posts ever since this condition entered/interrupted my (old) life.

I want to make this a statement, but I’m still trying to make progress on Sword of Moonlight. I’m writing to formally announce there’s a new SomEx “release” available/uploaded. It’s focused on variable speed animation, enabling playback on monitors with higher than 60hz frame rates. The first-person arm animations are now timed according to the power gauges. There’s also a patch that adds multi undo and redo to SOM_MAP.

My schizophrenia is telling me I should try to explain how it affects my life. I or “we” live with constant talking “voices” that are like psychic communications, and mine are dialogues, where I’m able to interrupt them, and they’re able to understand what I’m thinking about what they’re saying, and adjust their “dialogue” accordingly. I have experienced audiovisual hallucinations, but they are infrequent. We are depressed to some degree most of the time. I’m taking a small dosage of “prozac” and several drugs in total. I’m not experiencing behavioral problems. I’m trying to remain stress free for my health and longevity. I’m lying down as I need to. I’m mostly getting up to do things when I reach a point of feeling disgusted with myself, my inactivity rather prompts me to get up and do something, and lie back down. My finances and independence are helped by SSI in the US. I will be receiving a full amount of assistance beginning on August 1. In light of all of this you can still support me and Sword of Moonlight on my Patreon. I’m not really a low-energy person now, however my lifestyle is touch and go, and probably less productive. I’ve enjoyed talking to my voices, because I like to talk, and I find most people don’t want to talk. I’m always looking for a silver lining. They’re currently excited that we’re going to my cousin’s wedding tomorrow. They want everyone to know that! (They think my blog posts here aren’t personable enough!!)

So PLEASE check out SOM and try out the map editor with full undo/redo. It also draws more smooth now too!

More: swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k/devlog/725225/variable-frame-rate-animation

Since last seen I’ve put finishing touches on the new tile icon generation system and the old tile system too. The latter is now accessed by pushing the slider bar in the map editor to the very top. The slider can also now be used to fade out the grid lines and to fade in direction arrows.

There’s many more additions mentioned in a wrap-up address inside the Discussion forum. The advanced profile editing tools can now be left open while working, and the Alt key works with clicking to open a 3D model editor. The parts editor tool now has a UUID system shoehorned into the icon field. This works because the old style icons are secondary to computer generated icons. The art system also uses this icon generation system on everything else so its “shortcut” files display a thumbnail graphic. I want to add that a whole lot of work has gone into all of this. The new map icons fill in the space between the grids and include a 2 pixel border for shadow highlights. Getting everything right took weeks.

Continued: Something old, something new…

An important milestone has (finally) been reached by Sword of Moonlight by realizing the original King’s Field single environment experience of no “loading screens” after hopping into the game. This is something King’s Field fans always gloat about since it was pretty novel back in the day, and even to this day lately I’ve played a little bit of some PlayStation 4 games and am finding myself shocked how much of the time is really just spent on minutes long loading screens. In my opinion I would happily remove the high fidelity visuals in these games for practical seconds long loading screens. Of course, no load screens would be ideal.

Continued: Passing between worlds

I’m pleased to announce I’ve completed the most grueling round of work I’ve ever done on Sword of Moonlight and all the new files are online for the taking.

I did two long release cycles back-to-back except the first was not published because it didn’t have anything to offer to the general public. What it was instead was a big task to bolt on an OpenGL based alternative mode for SOM because new VR peripherals for PC don’t work with Direct3D 9. I chose OpenGL because I’ve used it plenty in the past and the newer systems like Vulkan and Direct3D 11 or 12 are completely different in terms of their design and are much more complicated, so it would be an even bigger effort to write code for those and it would be very alien to my past experience.

Continued: Long time no update! (Sorry about that)