simple machines forum

Schizophrenia has been making everything in my life twice as hard for about 1.5 years now. I’m sorry to apologize for my infrequent blog posts ever since this condition entered/interrupted my (old) life.

I want to make this a statement, but I’m still trying to make progress on Sword of Moonlight. I’m writing to formally announce there’s a new SomEx “release” available/uploaded. It’s focused on variable speed animation, enabling playback on monitors with higher than 60hz frame rates. The first-person arm animations are now timed according to the power gauges. There’s also a patch that adds multi undo and redo to SOM_MAP.

My schizophrenia is telling me I should try to explain how it affects my life. I or “we” live with constant talking “voices” that are like psychic communications, and mine are dialogues, where I’m able to interrupt them, and they’re able to understand what I’m thinking about what they’re saying, and adjust their “dialogue” accordingly. I have experienced audiovisual hallucinations, but they are infrequent. We are depressed to some degree most of the time. I’m taking a small dosage of “prozac” and several drugs in total. I’m not experiencing behavioral problems. I’m trying to remain stress free for my health and longevity. I’m lying down as I need to. I’m mostly getting up to do things when I reach a point of feeling disgusted with myself, my inactivity rather prompts me to get up and do something, and lie back down. My finances and independence are helped by SSI in the US. I will be receiving a full amount of assistance beginning on August 1. In light of all of this you can still support me and Sword of Moonlight on my Patreon. I’m not really a low-energy person now, however my lifestyle is touch and go, and probably less productive. I’ve enjoyed talking to my voices, because I like to talk, and I find most people don’t want to talk. I’m always looking for a silver lining. They’re currently excited that we’re going to my cousin’s wedding tomorrow. They want everyone to know that! (They think my blog posts here aren’t personable enough!!)

So PLEASE check out SOM and try out the map editor with full undo/redo. It also draws more smooth now too!

More: swordofmoonlight.itch.io/k/devlog/725225/variable-frame-rate-animation

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.6.zip is the current release file.

It's also available at http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/main/single-file-download/

Language packs are needed to get the Redo button to appear. Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z works to redo with or without this new button. The Delete button is removed. And in SOM_PRM the Record and Remove buttons are removed to match. The Cut buttons can still be used, and your Del key should still work.

BTW, if anybody would like to join this forum, the current process is to signup for the main site and go to (or join) the r/SwordOfMoonlight Discord at https://discord.gg/x782kpHQ7E and ask for me there (m. is my name there) to okay your new user account. This is on account email is no longer working from this website, so it can't email your password to you. These instructions are part of the signup form. I've been thinking about trying to add Google login integration, if/when interest grows.

Woops! I just found a killer bug in the KF1 demo with do_fix_damage_calculus=no.

KING'S FIELD

[Bugfix]

do_fix_damage_calculus = no

What was going on is the Strength and Magic bonuses aren't added so hits are 1 damage! I feel like crap about this.
I've fixed the SomEx.dll file if anyone wants it (http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.5.2.zip)
I've also updated the demo to include shields. And I think there may have been a problem with the MPX files. They now have to be built with SOM_MAP before playing, and I've added an Instructions.txt file to explain how to do it (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/Sword-of-Moonlight/Library/KING'S-FIELD/Instructions.txt)

Yesterday I uploaded some shield models that I mistakenly left out of the recent shield feature update. This makes shields either unusable or invisible without adding these models back. I found I neglected to SVN Add them.

I'm trying to generate shadow textures in x2mdl. I'm planning on packing these into ico (icon) files and putting one image in each RGBA channel. To draw them I think R and A images will need to be identical on subsequent frames. I don't know if they'll be doubled in the ICO file or not, but they'd need to be unpacked that way if not.

The idea is to blend between 4 frames in the shader. Only 2 frames will be needed but the others will still be calculated since they're in the same textures. They're just color channels after all. It'll probably slow down model conversion because the blurring effect has to pull in a bunch of pixels for each pixel, and there will be one of these for each animation frame.

I hope it will be worth it. For the Viper monster a round circle really doesn't make sense.

EDITED: Note, this image is a kraken's from KF2. I got this by doing 2 passes. The first pass just blurs everything by a 4 pixel radius. (It looks like more than 4 pixels because the white pixel 4 pixels from the edge is darkened and the dark pixel 4 pixels inside the edge is also lightened.) It needs to be that big to not look aliased. Antialiasing (multisample) isn't used because a height map is generated to produce some effects like you get if you are directly underneath a light. Unfortunately it's a little strange to be directly under a light all the time, but it's a little better than the fully abstract circle I think.

Patch

I've uploaded a patch for fixing some bugs and it adds a new way to rearrange SOM_MAP's palette area, and rotate icons in the palette area. And a way to change the view angle for tiles in the tile preview area.

The latter is saved in the PRT file and can be edited with the View menu in an updated PrtsEdit, but also if your keyboard has numpad keys, they can be pressed with Ctrl in SOM_MAP as a faster way to do this. The Ctrl Lock button works too.

To rearrange it's necessary to select with Shift or use Ctrl to drag, and the Ctrl Lock button works here too. Ctrl with Right click rotates the tile(s). The arrangement and rotations are stored in a my.plt file in the MAP folders. There is one in the install MAP folder, but if you modify things in SOM_MAP it will save to your own project MAP folder, which replaces the installation my.plt file.

The preview/view angle is not saved in my.plt. Again it's saved in the PRT file.

I had fun working on this with my schizophrenia. It came up with most of the ideas for this. And held my feet to the fire. Sometimes it's a drag though. I think I want to work on subtitles for the King's Field movies next, or scan the materials that come with SOM to make an instruction manual. Or work on my KF2 project more. I can't tell if my schizophrenia is going to be cooperative in this or not. These are some of its ideas. I do have ideas of my own along the way, but lately I'm not sure what to do, and I'm coping with schizophrenia, and so giving it some space to influence my activities. For better or worse.

Repository reset

FYI I've re-reset the new repo back to Revision 2. I'd accidentally included a bunch of shortcut (LNK) files from the art system, and the Moonlight.zip language pack wasn't updated. I've also updated the EXE files in TOOL.

Sword-of-Moonlight reset

I've reset the Subversion repository so that all the history is gone... I've saved a private copy as sex_history in case historians want to plumb it one day.

I'm going to be making a new blog post before long since there's a new release available. This change is to wipe the slate clean, but mainly to remove source code from the history, as I already removed the folders.

feature patch (x2md.dll)

I've added icons for all model files when creating shortcuts to the art folder. And the images use the source image as an icon.

The color for these icons is pretty bold because I'd like to have SOM_MAP display them one day. Probably in primary colors.

EDITED: There's also a fix for the Convert feature. And special note, x2mdl.exe isn't going to be in the TOOL folder or update packs anymore. It's being held back as a trade secret as I try to be more commercial, on recommendation, since other apps can use it, and it represents a lot of work, including for the new map tiles.