So, I realized recently a bug was introduced into the level design tool — not long ago, but not so recently either — that is so sinister that I stopped everything to prepare a new release in order to minimize the possibility of spoiling anyone’s fun.

Truth is, I was looking for an out anyway, since the latest work has spun off into multiple different directions, some completely unpredictable. The genesis of this release sprung from an inspired moment, that I couldn’t have predicted at all, at the time. And ended with only the basics of that idea realized. Instead, the focus of this release became a small side project to find a way for the tool’s two number tables to be able to set a column to the same value for more than one row at a time — in any combination. I wanted to do this since two or three releases ago, because this will be important in the future, in order to fully take advantage of a new way to adjust the order items are displayed in game menus. The basic problem being that the items need to be in the game before they can be so adjusted, and until now there was no easy way to do that than to manually select every one individually and input a quantity figure into these tables.

The reason this mushroomed, is the tables themselves are unique among the element’s of Sword of Moonlight’s tools. And since they are only in two relatively insignificant places, I had not personally spent a lot of time with them, and now that I was doing so, I saw their evidently substandard state, and felt it was high time to bring them up to code, whatever it took.

Continued: Spinning plates!

I’ve prepared a new release in 3 days flat, and am rushing it out to make this January 31 blog post.

I am very eager to work on Sword of Moonlight again. I’ve been absent since mid December, working on various things, some tangential to Sword of Moonlight, but mostly I’ve been very frustrated, feeling as if I was not being productive, whether or not I have been, the feeling persisted. Ostensibly I was working on a difficult problem to do with writing XML like documents and accoutrements to ZIP archives, within a framework of my own devising that is — as it turns out — perhaps too transparent for its own good. I cannot say why that work drug itself out for so long, other than it’s highly conceptual and because it was in service of a “software library” its bar is much higher than Sword of Moonlight’s. Adding insult to injury is the feature itself is more a logical gap than a pressing matter — no one really needs it, but logically it should be part of the feature set. It’s refreshing to be able to turn out a new and important feature in 3 days in comparison.

Continued: Back!

I’m presently dividing my time between Sword of Moonlight and finishing a rewrite of the COLLADA-DOM library that began at Sony. A month ago (30 days or so) I took a break from the other project and so — of course — returned to this one. I never got around to complementing the previous release as I’d intended to do. I usually ease back into this work by taking on smaller, more varied appetizers before I settle in for a main course. I do a few of these more substantial jobs every year.

This blog-post is about a new release; The substance of which is hard to categorize. It came about as a surprise; In short, I bit off more than I could chew.

Currently I’m postponing the major finishing touch in order to return to the other project for a time. I think this release grew from my experience having explored the Moratheia 2.1 demonstration in the months prior. I experienced some difficulties with it that I thought ought to be addressed. This release addresses two areas of concern.

Continued: Maps and menus and items, oh my!

October was a good month for Sword of Moonlight. It started with an unscheduled release that turned into possibly the most consequential yet, and because of it I was able to really dig in to Moratheia’s 2.1 demonstration (pictured) resulting in a string of “patch” alerts on the back of the new release, the likes that can only come about from many hours of genuine, uninterrupted play.

Combined with the first surprise release from late this year, in Moratheia’s project Sword of Moonlight appears able to make a fully professional showing. The earlier release removes pixellation from detailed images that form cutout shapes that are applied to two-sided paper thin polygon shapes. It sounds like a cheap effect, but Moratheia makes use of this to great effect, as can be seen in its many fine tree limbs (pictured) and grasses. The second surprise release is more or less an omnibus that started with the simple objective of extending the kind of geometry that can be walked over without encountering glitches, but would snowball to enhance and make perfect the solidity of Sword of Moonlight’s artistic worlds.

Furthermore, in this process, insidious, showstopping bugs were isolated and eliminated from Mortheia’s demo.

I believe that very soon Sword of Moonlight will be suitable to stage a competitive commercial offering. Moratheia appears poised to be the first such offering. That said, that Moratheia exists at all is nothing to sneeze at. Sword of Moonlight is very user-friendly, but also many parts of it are strictly off limits to users, and so I cannot endorse its fitness as a complete product at this time, and do not expect to be able to do so any day soon. Nevertheless, Moratheia is living proof that with enough patience and know-how, Sword of Moonlight can deliver very impressive results.

Seems I just can’t quit Sword of Moonlight! Earlier in September I made up my mind to work on the MHM files that are counterpart to the MSM files from last month. No one really knows what these acronyms mean. I hazard to guess Map Hull Model, and who knows for the S in MSM. Sculpture? Possibly its Japanese.

I thought it’d be a small project, because there is — or ought to be — far fewer MHM to MSM files. I added value to the exteriors set by fitting it together vertically, forming terraces, that look like a strip mine. This is something users like to do with the odd set that is experimental compared to the interiors. It’s the only one that isn’t a level of From Software’s remake of King’s Field included with SOM, an enticement doubling as a demonstration.

Continued: Escape from Sword of Moonlight

As a result of my endeavoring to do good by Sword of Moonlight in the back half of 2017 two remarkable things came about:

The first came out of left field. Something I’d thought about doing for years: it applies a meager form of classical antialiasing to the shapes cutout by black parts of texture-mapped images. This counters pixelation. I ended up doing this now because of a secondary interest in “cross-platform” text rendering; that is a challenging problem. I was considering an approach that made me curious about what this would look like, and I thought I should try to do this first, since it was simpler.

There is virtually nothing on the WWW about classical antialiasing, much less examples in software. I found some resources for implementing a relatively modern approximation called MLAA. It is not really suitable for this application, but the results were a marked improvement, so I’ve made it the default technology going forward.

The next development would be a major undertaking to finally seal the cracks I opened up in 2015 when I developed the modern replacement technology for the earlier antialiasing extension. Note that these kinds of “antialiasing” are unrelated. The new development smooths precise, purely black and white edges; whereas the “antialiasing extension” produces straight geometric lines in 3D images, and does so by preventing aliasing in the first place, akin to how MSAA works or worked, but leverages time and our eyes, so that our silicon computers can be used for more interesting things.

Continued: Return to Sword of Moonlight