To anybody visiting or returning to here, I’ve not dropped the ball on Sword of Moonlight and everything else, but I’ve been going through a lot in the past months that’s been spurred on by a “supernatural” string of daily events pushing and pulling me in different directions. I want to say it’s all in my head and I need some kind of medical attention, but the truth is there’s not really a medical solution and it’s not medical seeming at all. I’ve had a day job for less than 2.5 months, that I had to quit because the work environment was surprisingly bad, even though the job itself was a really good fit for me. I’m also trying to fit work on projects into my life. But I’m being regularly encouraged to find friends, and even make a family. But something about the “path” I’m walking is showing me how difficult or impossible that can be in our world today under my circumstances. I think I’m not alone in this. So, I just want everyone to know, that I really need to make friends somehow okay. I know that not everyone has a platform like a website, like this, and a game dev project/system to be able to reach out like I’m doing now. And right now this site has problems, including that email notifications aren’t working, so people (you) can’t even register with it until I can figure out what’s stopped working in the past few months.

You can leave a comment on this post if you want to get in touch so we can register you or help you out with Sword of Moonlight or even hang out.

https://discord.gg/x782kpHQ7E is a permanent Discord invite, where you can contact me on Discord as “m.” in there. #7761 is my full ID if you want to make direct contact, if that’s simpler for you. I’ve tried to find places to meet people in my city and just about every dating app, and it’s not working out for me. I’ve tried using Discord in meetup groups, to some extent, where young people are teenagers. It seems like right now it’s very hard to make contact with anyone if you’re alone, which I think a lot of us probably are now. My city isn’t a big city, I’m thinking of going to swimming pools soon, I mean, cities seem like bigger ghost towns right now than King’s Field’s towns. I wouldn’t have thought it until I really tried to. I was most surprised by dating apps. I mean they don’t work at all, they’re gold digging scams, and it’s almost impossible to meet people through them. So, where I stand is, please, if you believe in this project, let’s talk and be in a loop together. I’m trying to get my act together, but this may be my final front page post for a while.

I’m still working bugs out of the new order-independent transparency feature that’s become my focus of late. I’m aware of some performance problems. A generic transparency system (sorting triangles by screen depth) is a tall order. It’s something that I hope will make Sword of Moonlight standout since it’s something modern games have given up on making work.

Meanwhile my life is pretty weird, and I’m trying to clean up my house and family land.

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!)

An important milestone has (finally) been reached by Sword of Moonlight by realizing the original King’s Field single environment experience of no “loading screens” after hopping into the game. This is something King’s Field fans always gloat about since it was pretty novel back in the day, and even to this day lately I’ve played a little bit of some PlayStation 4 games and am finding myself shocked how much of the time is really just spent on minutes long loading screens. In my opinion I would happily remove the high fidelity visuals in these games for practical seconds long loading screens. Of course, no load screens would be ideal.

I believe From Software published Sword of Moonlight so that it would be carried away by its public. This is a crucial facility no King’s Field Making Tool is complete without. I believe Sword of Moonlight would not have been published in this form except as a challenge to take it up. We should not forget that Sword of Moonlight is modeled on a sword after all.

I’m pleased to announce I’ve completed the most grueling round of work I’ve ever done on Sword of Moonlight and all the new files are online for the taking.

I did two long release cycles back-to-back except the first was not published because it didn’t have anything to offer to the general public. What it was instead was a big task to bolt on an OpenGL based alternative mode for SOM because new VR peripherals for PC don’t work with Direct3D 9. I chose OpenGL because I’ve used it plenty in the past and the newer systems like Vulkan and Direct3D 11 or 12 are completely different in terms of their design and are much more complicated, so it would be an even bigger effort to write code for those and it would be very alien to my past experience.

Once I completed that task the OpenGL performance wasn’t good enough, so I wanted to experiment with the dynamic vertex buffers, since SOM only uses dynamic buffers, which OpenGL is not good for. But to do that it’s necessary to rebuild all of the model files, like the MDO files, and remove the MDL files, so I realized that the time had finally come to do a project I’ve long been considering to unify SOM’s model files and build an art system into SOM to make it aware of the art development process.

Continued: Long time no update! (Sorry about that)

Something of note occurred a while ago. Briefly, for a long time now Sword of Moonlight has had a unique anti-aliasing technique for which I’ve continued to develop complementary 3D image-based graphical effects. This line of work has matured and now has reached a conclusion. It started when I had an idea I thought could address its main weakness: that is it takes more than one image frame to create a double exposure image, which means it can’t anti-alias a single image by itself, or put another way: when a picture is moving it can’t do its job.

This is an economical solution because it doesn’t require any resources or time on the computer to compute its results. When a picture is moving it can be hard to make out its edges, so anti-aliasing isn’t as important. So it mostly washes out, except it’s still a legitimate mark against this technique. To solve this problem (with an equally no resources solution) (as well as it can be solved) the new complementary technique works to remove contrast on moving edges. This looks like an unfocused image on the moving edge.

Continued: Anti-aliasing announcement

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.