This micro-release includes a complete makeover in terms of how Sword of Moonlight interacts with the Windows desktop. Windows 7 introduced a number of new taskbar related features that impose restrictions on how applications behave. It took me so long to notice that this is a problem for SOM because these new features are disabled for programs that are not stored on a local disk volume.

The immediate problems stemming from this were addressed by a patch that was made to the previous release. Now I am following up with a full treatment for post-Vista versions of Windows. That said the changes apply to all supported versions of Windows. I had not intended to do so until tests I ran on XP earlier today showed that this is necessary. Anyway, it’s probably for the best.

In the beginning of this release my goal was to decide how to best group the various tools on the taskbar, and how to establish a program that can be “pinned” to the taskbar. Pinning is absolutely essential in Windows 8 since it doesn’t possess a Start menu, although this is rumored to be changing in the next iteration, but one wonders even if it does, will the menu be backported to 8?

I also looked into adding an extended menu to the launcher early on; this is a feature wherein Windows 7 it’s possible to right-click icons in the taskbar and Start menu in order to open a menu that can be customized to a degree. Indeed a lot of the problems arise from an apparent inability to customize the built-in section of this menu.

But I didn’t stop there. I’ve taken the opportunity to completely rethink and rebrand the superficial experience, and in the process I’ve been able to streamline numerous aspects of the initiation process in ways that I find extraordinarily pleasing. By rebrand I mean to say that I put a lot of work into the icons, and even changed some of them, including the shortcut titles that accompany them and the product descriptions embedded in the programs files (I didn’t change any of FromSoftware’s product information, although it could probably stand to be changed. In any case it’s never visible.)

Continued: 7 ways Sword of Moonlight has changed

Two weeks — and it’s new release time once again. What’s new is some old stuff around control mechanics from last year has been finalized so to be presentable in game form.

Namely the player can go anywhere jumping and climbing wise without running into problems around ceilings, and transitions between levels and within levels should now be seamless.

There are also critical fixes pertaining to the prior release for anyone not keeping up with patches, and the in-game menus are a little bit nicer now thanks to a good idea that happened between releases; the idea was to let text in the menus be scooted over to make more room, so that there is no longer any abbreviated text to be found in the built-in English translation.

Last but not least there is a new feature that lets the player character behave as a monster does when they get hit. It replaces the old experimental approach to this, and is super easy to setup. I must add that I was particularly pleased with this unexpected addition, and very pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. I regard it as a natural fit; the best part of working on Sword of Moonlight for me has to be the developments I never saw coming…

For me it’s an absolute joy, a supreme joy, and so far an absolutely private joy of my own for myself. What a shame. I encourage everyone following Sword of Moonlight to get involved. You can wait but you will miss out on the formative period if you do.

*cough* *cough*

There is a new release up — concluding what became five months work to ready textual translations for Sword of Moonlight’s core tools and data files. What we have is bare bones for now. For Japanese you won’t need to change a thing. For English you will still need to follow these directions until further notice.

What’s changed, aside from every single profile in the DATA file tree, is things are now known by their names. For example, the Moonlight Sword is no longer described as “Great sword [2]“, but is instead described simply as (wait for it) “Moonlight Sword”. Just the same all characters are described by their name as it appears in the King’s Field remake/sample game. Or more precisely the names were taken from the original PlayStation game. The remaining profiles are assigned characters taken from the game’s sequels.

The rationale behind this change is to make it easier to pick a profile out of a menu, but also to make way for future profiles. Of which we can assume there will be a multitude. Last but not least, in order to restore the original convention (although as a matter of fact, there is ample evidence in the profiles themselves that this policy change actually reverts to a prior, long lost, eventually overturned policy) a new system has been devised to allow project managers to sort profiles into arbitrary groups, or sets, and all of the profiles have been assigned to more than 100 such sets as part of this release.

The sets are not the same, but similar. The Moonlight Sword is part of the longsword set, so it appears alongside other longswords, rather than “great swords” — of which there actually are none. Oh and! In an unexpected twist, this release makes it easier than ever to get the most out of Sword of Moonlight thanks to some additions to the “new project” step.

Further details (and patches) are as always covered within the forum addendum, but before going any further I must remind you that this is really just one more of many more steps. In the right direction sure. The text is all done. But the art is still a shambles at best, and so on.