Today I published a body of work that’s been underway for some weeks. I’m doing a write up since things have been quiet around here in the meantime. I’ve been doing three projects with some overlap, 1 has been my ongoing work on the Sword of Moonlight animation file format, and 2 at some point I realized a simple way to have the animations playback at full speed at 60 frames per second, as opposed to playing out at 30 frames per second, and 3 because of this change numerous other parts of the player software had to be upgraded to double speed at the same time. At the same time I’ve been looking at the model of a human arm that appears when you use your weapon in the games, and how it is positioned on screen, since Sword of Moonlight does it differently from King’s Field. I don’t know if it’s based on Shadow Tower of if it just does it its own way.
All of these things have come to a head keeping me from publishing anything until now. By working on the animation front I’ve been able to refurbish the arm model in order to support changes to how it’s displayed. It’s long been at odds with some extensions. It’s been possible to make an all new arm model, but in this case I’ve been able to take the original and work on it further without disturbing its information content. That’s a milestone in its own right, since it shows it’s now possible to improve on the original animations that are included with Sword of Moonlight’s sample art work and retelling of King’s Field. I wanted to bring the arm up higher and make it larger on screen. I couldn’t do that without editing it to look nice up close.
The arm effect is also upgraded to look nice at 60 frames per second in what was one of the greater challenges I faced. It now has four times as many animation frames. It turns out showing something commonplace moving fast in your face in first-person is hard to do with great efficiency. I’m releasing this work as a patch to the current release this time around. It coincides with a crash fix and I’ve just been dumping patches into this release right now while I work on King’s Field II. I worry about getting swept up in a side project as its deadline draws near.
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