simple machines forum

Welcome to the map piece tinkering thread.

I put this under projects as it's a joint effort between Holy and I.
Holy at the helm with ideas and scrutiny, and myself bearing the monotony of conversions*, modifications, etc.

So rather than bounce emails back and forth about tinkering with the map models in order to achieve map pieces that'll work with the new AA system, I've opened this thread to hopefully improve workflow and discussion. I'm expecting him to make edits to this (top) posts when I've missed something, and to the Required modifications section. I don't mind editing in his ideas for convenience.

I'll place a beside my posts in the ideas section.

EDITED: I guess I am then. *The "monotony of conversions" should cease to be a thing before the end of 2016, if I meet all of my goals for the year.

Project summary
Verdite says:
Modification of the original SOM pieces is required in order to achieve an accurate representation of the new AA system (and show it off.)

Required modifications
Holy answers RFC:
Eliminate all ("AA"-related) cracks for tiles that obviously mate with one another. Details in Replies.

Ideas and brainstorming
  12/01/16
Uniform separate step model to apply to models of same height. Same will apply for all map pieces in other sets.


I cannot grasp what this image is demonstrating (it's a little small for me to be honest) but I am automatically against tiles that bury themselves into the ground like potatoes or carrots. I am not especially crazy about SOM's original stock artwork, but it is very sacrosanct, if only because it represents From's original product. I honestly do not think we should invest too much into it right now. It will not produce the best showcases for SOM. I want to get defects out, but after that, I'd rather you focus on your own artwork, or help with the project to port KF2 to SOM. It's high time for SOM to make an impression on outsiders, one way or another.

17/1/16
The image depicts a 'foot' model to go below map pieces in order to create steps. The extrusion of the roof edges is required, else there will be an unsightly gap.
Absolutely agree, I hope we can get this project done and dusted soon. I'd like to work on finishing up Moratheia after this. Hopefully with a new x2mdl in the pipeline to give me a boost.

17/1/18
I'm not good at imagining these things. There won't be a new x2anything, you'll just save/export to DAE and the player/editors will automatically do any necessary conversion/caching, probably even without stop/restarting the running programs. Just remember, if you make new tiles for the original sets, they must have proper icons, that are easy to make sense about.


Public and joint effort files
17/01/16
Set 1 ready for AA testing. Not yet stepped.
Set 1 msm files.

12/01/16
Pristine, converted parts 0-78 are available to review here.
File is saved as an .mqo. This will require Metasequoia, or MetasequoiaLE to view.
Please make sure you place the Texture folder into your Metaseq directory, then merge it with the existing Texture folder.

This is the official Moratheia Sword of Moonlight thread. All news etc goes in here.

Summary

Moratheia is possibly the longest and most involving Sword of Moonlight project to date that has been in development for over 2.5 years. Many iterations and tests of the game have been released in order to better polish the custom gameplay, system and enemies, as the project uses no original stock art from the original SOM install or any other game.
However the final public release is still being held back in order to offer the best experience the author intends to deliver.

With original and unique settings, music, sound effects, consistent imaginative art forms, faster combat, involving story and good pacing, Moratheia gives players a Kings Field experience like no other.


Site Administrator speaking: It's 2019, I'm putting a copy of my Moratheia 2.1 demo folder here in case anyone wants to see it. I didn't do anything to prepare it. You may want to change some settings. More in Reply #12. The file is 1.24GB big. It is Moratheia 2.1.zip in http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy and you need to combine these to form a download URL yourself so it's not too easy for WWW spiders to download/suck out this site's bandwidth. (EDITED: To be clear, you won't find the screens from Reply #9 down in this demo. I hope that version is ever published, but this is not it.)

2021 UPDATE: If you can there's a new supersampling mode you can toggle with Alt+F1 that will remove most of the cracks that are caused by the do_aa extension. It will come at a cost of "worse" game performance, so if your PC gets choppy when you turn it on, try to not use widescreen first, and then consider lowering resolution a little or just turn it off and live with the cracks. This demo could have much better frame rates but it has many, many unnecessary polygons (you can't even see) which nevertheless must be converted to pixels...

Oh and you should add the following to the Ex.ini file to get rid of most of the black pixels on the edges of grass and trees. A lot of these things have thick black edges originally but recently SomEx.dll has switched to defaulting to treating 0,0,0 as a hole in a texture whereas prior any color between 0,0,0 and 7,7,7 would form a hole.

April 2022 UPDATE: A INI setting (shown below) called do_fix_trip_zone_range=no is needed to change maps because it seems the transfer events aren't situated at the same elevation as the level geometry.

[Bugfix]
;this demo was made when black colors up to 7,7,7
;were taken to be colorkey pixels (even though the
;game program requests a pure black only colorkey)
do_fix_colorkey = no

;this is needed so map change events extend out to
;infinity elevation. I'm not sure why they're not bound
;to objects at the ground level, but they're not
do_fix_trip_zone_range = no

ATTACHMENT INFO

I'm uploading my Ex.ini file in case it's helpful, but be warned it has changes to the damage formulas. I doubt you can play this demo without such changes anyway.