For a very long time I’ve pursued a side project of developing art productivity software to support Sword of Moonlight. For many years I’ve worked on developing COLLADA as a format for storing “3D” art for use by game projects.

Since mid-to-early last year I’ve been busy developing an actual application for artists to use in place of popular 3D modeling packages like Blender. That’s taken up most of my time, and I was doing it in preparation to work on my personal game project to port King’s Field II to Sword of Moonlight.

Continued: Making "modeling" software

I’ve been itching to write a post for this blog ever since my last, if not for a subject. If I had staid course I think by now I’d have a release of the 3D modeling software I’ve been developing ever since earlier last year. But I have something better since not long ago I heard from the Moratheia project it’s back on (this was posted sometime earlier, complete with a new image) which shortly put me to work on Sword of Moonlight!

I’ve not put out a new release since mid last year, and hadn’t intended to release this one now after just 2 or 3 weeks except I want to write a blog and publish an unplanned fix for the PlayStation and Xbox trigger buttons I’d rather not sit on.

Continued: Every part of the controller

Damn! it’s been 3 months without an update. I guess I should put something… here.

Continued: Not dead! King's Field II

I feel like there should be a lot to say about this, but I am perhaps too exhausted to say it. So, in brief, some months ago (I can’t recall how many) I began to notice some mysterious code within Sword of Moonlight, that I thought must indicate something was removed, to do with playing more than one level at a time. I thought it could be “layers” or a corridor between levels, or both of these things. I looked into it once or twice since. I even felt it may have been a load balancing system.

A month or so ago a person appeared who was working on figuring out the contents of King’s Field II’s disc for the PlayStation. Speaking with them got me to take a look myself, since it’s something I’ve been meaning to do. I wasn’t much help, but I did notice that there is two layers on each of the game’s zones. The other layer is interleaved with the first. I realized that’s the only place it could be, going by the size of the files that remained. That was a few weeks ago or more. Ever since then, I began work on making a layer system available to Sword of Moonlight, starting with its strange code from before.

Continued: Layer feature unearthed, now restored

A major release is now available. Also, the Windows 8/10 spellchecker service is enabled. PlayStation VR came a long way since the the last blog post, but is and will remain a demonstration.

This release adds an entire new dimension to Sword of Moonlight’s tools, by integrating new, full-featured profile editors into the main tools. The new editors replace the old model viewers, and while they remain a little rough around the edges owing to exhaustion, have a lot more character, since they have lighting, and pose characters, and also they use the same graphical pathway as the game player component, and so have access to all of the same visual effects, including the antialiasing extensions.

Continued: Things to come

Here’s an interesting stopgap release — it’s not what I’d planned, and it’s a demonstration first-and-foremost — but it’s also an official release, because it includes some of the best performance enhancements for Windows 7 and later Windows, and fixes some bugs that had arrived too late to be patched. I’ve been hard at work ever since I acquired a PlayStation VR in order to apply it to Sword Of Moonlight, but got taken off guard by the headset’s enchanting home-theater mode. (More on it later.)

There are so many possible releases, all up in the air, right now, never mind VR; Nevertheless, in the last several days it’s been the only thing I can think about. I expected to release a full PlayStation VR demonstration, except for the headset that I received seemed to have apparent display anomalies that forced me to send it back for a replacement, and so in the meantime I could only finish the demonstration’s visual component:

Continued: Let there be light