I’m excited to announce, I got a job, I don’t got a paycheck, but one should be around the corner. Anyway, I am trying to pick up the pieces of my work here. I’m going to be focusing on my King’s Field II project in my off hours, whenever I can. My life has been in upheaval for a while, and this post is just to set the record straight. Those who’ve followed me the past few months know things have been crazy, crazy, crazy. Okay, okay. I don’t know if I can hit that 2025 deadline, but my plans are to work until 2025 at a minimum. I’m working 30hrs a week. I think I can keep my medicaid this way, since the restaurant I’m working at doesn’t have health insurance. And that’s about all I can say.

I have done a little bit of work on order-independent transparency, since that is what I was working on when I got blindsided. It’s one of the hardest problems I’ve faced, and it kicked my butt back then. But I’m trying to get back on that horse in the meantime. I want to make my demo more well rounded, and I want to make Sword of Moonlight (here) easier to setup. I’m dedicated. If I’m going to pull this off I have to work harder than I was and sleep less.

Update: I’ve found a solution for order-independent transparency (same day!)

At https://swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k I’ve published an early demo of my King’s Field II project that’s haunted me for the past half year. At the speed I was able to work I’ve only produced a beginning that comprises my goals for the second demo I promised almost two years ago, to the day. Most the lost time was bound up in developing tools for working with the 3D models and ensuring compatibility with the existing models. This included developing a cross-platform UI system and 3D art package and utilities.

The demo is using a new update to Sword of Moonlight that’s also the subject of this announcement. It includes a number of features that aren’t yet readily accessible to projects, since they’re not fully developed and integrated into the basic tools. In the final month before publishing I found myself working furiously on the control system since it made some interesting leaps at the last moment and I wanted to take it as a sign I should ride that wave in order to use its public visibility to showcase the control system.

Also included is a significant graphical enhancement that grew out of needing to reproduce the PlayStation’s unfiltered colors, that has the effect of reducing ghosting and moire like artifacts. It works by converting the pixel values into physical units and blending before converting back. Most games do this for lighting calculations today but it doesn’t work very well for low-poly models so I’m limiting its use to color blending.