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.
This release adds to Sword of Moonlight new modes for for the first time to be able to see the world model’s boundary geometry. Sword of Moonlight could get away with this as long as developers weren’t in the business of working with boundary geometry. If you found yourself in that boat, you could only play-test the product and inside it virtually rub yourself up against every surface to determine if they are satisfactorily impermeable or not! While this may sound like just good wholesome fun, it isn’t exactly a good use of developers’ time. I myself was doing boundary geometry modeling work toward the end of 2017 and I stopped doing it, because I could see that, by working blind, my work had been prone to error and time consuming. And so I resolved to work on the absent-feature problem, before resuming my modeling effort to polish and streamline the From Software staff’s artistic contributions.
In brief, one of the main editor’s screens is expanded, and a secondary goal involved changing its workflow to make way for near-term expansions, since it will host most if not all of the new map work features in store for 2018 (all of which will serve the greater goal of bringing a complete reproduction of King’s Field II to Sword of Moonlight in 2020 in recognition of both product’s respective 25th and 20th anniversaries.)
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