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Author Topic: EXIT: Speed of life  (Read 2170 times)

Holey Moley

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look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology
Holey Moley says,
« on: August 02, 2020, 02:39:27 PM »

Today I published a body of work that’s been underway for some weeks. I’m doing a write up since things have been quiet around here in the meantime. I’ve been doing three projects with some overlap, 1 has been my ongoing work on the Sword of Moonlight animation file format, and 2 at some point I realized a simple way to have the animations playback at full speed at 60 frames per second, as opposed to playing out at 30 frames per second, and 3 because of this change numerous other parts of the player software had to be upgraded to double speed at the same time. At the same time I’ve been looking at the model of a human arm that appears when you use your weapon in the games, and how it is positioned on screen, since Sword of Moonlight does it differently from King’s Field. I don’t know if it’s based on Shadow Tower of if it just does it its own way.

All of these things have come to a head keeping me from publishing anything until now. By working on the animation front I’ve been able to refurbish the arm model in order to support changes to how it’s displayed. It’s long been at odds with some extensions. It’s been possible to make an all new arm model, but in this case I’ve been able to take the original and work on it further without disturbing its information content. That’s a milestone in its own right, since it shows it’s now possible to improve on the original animations that are included with Sword of Moonlight’s sample art work and retelling of King’s Field. I wanted to bring the arm up higher and make it larger on screen. I couldn’t do that without editing it to look nice up close.

The arm effect is also upgraded to look nice at 60 frames per second in what was one of the greater challenges I faced. It now has four times as many animation frames. It turns out showing something commonplace moving fast in your face in first-person is hard to do with great efficiency. I’m releasing this work as a patch to the current release this time around. It coincides with a crash fix and I’ve just been dumping patches into this release right now while I work on King’s Field II. I worry about getting swept up in a side project as its deadline draws near.

I just wanted to write something for the front page blog. Instead of making this a "release" I'm just linking to a patch, below. I'm not sure why I feel like just patching this release, but maybe it's because I'm having to rush things to be able to work on King's Field II and I feel like eventually if I keep patching the loose ends will get tied up. Like I haven't been documenting a lot of things and I worry I am not giving myself enough time to do proper releases right now, which is one reason this patch is identical to what I would be releasing. (This is explained in the link, quoted below.)

Feature/crash fix patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.2.zip
http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/data/my/model/ARM.MDL

I was about to possibly put out a new release but in the last minute I somehow crashed the program in a way that hadn't happened before, so as a result I want to patch this crash that was introduced in the previous patch, and as it just so happens the patch includes what would be in a new release, so I'm possibly just going to keep rolling things into this release via patches.

I may make a blog post with or without a release. I will have to see what I feel like doing.

The crash happens in the jump system because I had it to read past the end of a buffer. It's a wonder it didn't show up until weeks later, but that stuff just happens.

This patch includes the new 60fps code I've been working on for a long time, and it changes how the arm is displayed when attacking, so I've included a new-and-improved ARM.MDL file (link above) that you want to make sure is in your DATA/MY folder.

This ARM.MDL is a lot better but the animations are identical to the old one. I think that its animations should probably be changed too, eventually, but what to change them to is a major decision I can't deal with right now. I do think the chop should be centered and not twist around. The thrust seems pretty lame too.

A lot of work has gone into this upgrade to 60fps animations and effects. The attack animations now have four times as many frames, but to do that they are blurred together to form a sweep of afterimages. And the transparency effect used is not great, but it's the same as the one for fading things in.

I definitely want to program a better system for the transparent elements before long. By that I mean a full BSP triangle sorting/partitioning system.

If you can take time to browse my contemporary posts in the forum I'm working on numerous things, but mostly model editing and model conversion tools. That work is beginning to wind down. I feel like I've been working on this for a very long time now. So hopefully I will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and be able to prepare a new demo of my KF2 project.

I'm hoping that once all of the technical pieces are in place the project will almost finish itself. The problem solving stuff is all on the front end. The art already exists, so it just has to be transferred over as fast as my legs can carry me. I don't expect to have a final version by the end of the year, but I want to have a playable version of the full game.

EDITED: Please refer to this (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=309.0) older topic/thread for patches. Usually I put patches in the newest blog post discussion, but I've opted this time to not make a new release.
« Last Edit: August 07, 2020, 10:43:40 AM by Holy Diver »
Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

Holey Moley has 2726 posts