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 blending alone.
http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.4.zip is the new SomEx.dll file.
I'm trying to relax for a while after an extended period of focusing on publishing this demo before the end of the year. It's just the beginning of November, so I might have a little bit more in me yet, but I don't want to be in a hard-nosed mindset for the last months of 2020. I have a number of projects I've been neglecting, but too I think I will say I'm probably interested in, slowly and aimlessly, picking at the problem of how to make SOM's monster's behave like KF2's.
I should probably try to include a list of additions to this update here. I'm not sure I can do that very exhaustively this time. I'll try to over time.
As for the third paragraph, this is called "sRGB" that is kind of a misleading term, but it just means (I think) a standard for interpreting pixels in images. I don't know if VESA standards adhered to this interpretation, but graphics features started to appear to do conversions automatically. One of these converts pixel values in GPU shaders into wavelength values (CIEXYZ?) that is more correct for blending colors. Like blending red and green makes yellow instead of brown. I'd not considered using this with SOM because I didn't think about using it selectively just for blending colors. If it's used for lighting it wouldn't look good with SOM because in real life light is much harsher than in old school video games. You can't represent harsh light unless your model is very detailed and you use per-pixel lighting instead of per-vertex lighting. I tend to think this harsh light doesn't look very good. But it looks blemished with low-poly data, even if you use per-pixel lighting you can't approximate the surface correctly with low-poly data. So I had to think out of the box to see its use, and KFII forced me to, since there was no other way to match what its color looks like on the PlayStation. The reason that is-is the PlayStation does no blending whatsoever, no filtering, and so it doesn't even have this problem. Your eyes just see what they see.
Just off the top of my head there are a few things in the control system that excited me a lot. I will list those now.
1) I got lucky in finding a way to walk down stairs that doesn't stumble down them as if falling off platforms. I didn't think this was possible (without special stair detection/behavior) but I had to solve a problem with falling off short platforms feeling very bad. By this I mean something that's in between a ledge and a stair. The first thing I found that worked happen to work for walking down stairs. Before this to not stumble down stairs it was necessary to slowdown with the analog input. That's kind of neat too since you have to do that in real life, but I didn't think that was a long term solution since gamers don't want to have to remember to do that to avoid stumbling. Very steep stairs still require slowing down, but these are the stairs of nightmares that wouldn't exist for pedestrian building codes.
2) There's technically a sitting system now, so the PC can behave like the NPCs and sit down on things. One of my goals is to unify the PC and NPC models so that it feels like it's just another NPC it its world. This system is basically free because it's identical to the squatting system. It comes from a new ability to climb onto platforms by bending over them so that when you summit you end up in a squatting pose instead of a standing pose. For shorter platforms this results in your head being lower than when you started climbing so it's as if taking a seat. The height difference between squatting in a seat and sitting upright is about as tall as your ankle, so in video game terms you can't really tell a difference.
3) The bending over system that lets you look down very far and even backward is refined. I had to simplify it somewhat to make it stable. But it wouldn't feel right sweeping over arbitrary objects of different heights and sizes anyway. I had a difficult time keeping it from clipping through geometry. Especially when dashing immediately into walls. Of course you wouldn't normally do that kind of thing but it still requires special logic. crouching was another hard case because it can technically lean out even further than normal because the bending over ability is attenuated when leaning into walls and obstacles but not when leaning out in a crouch, but nevertheless it abuts walls and obstacles. I worked on this when tightening up regular clipping.
4) I've tweaked every aspect of the control system, and a lot of that may have ended up in the previous release's final patch. I will try to recount all of that one day. The last thing I want to touch on today is the "wall-grab" system is tightened up so you don't go as far when pulling backward (this tends to look exaggerated and I've lessened jumping backward for the same reason) so that it can work interchangeably for pulling open doors. This can be done to levers or other things if you want too. And it's now possible to activate objects by crouching or grabbing them and letting go. (I'm currently considering having pressing all three buttons while not moving do a wall-grab in thin air so it can be done anywhere without crouching or having a wall and even while sneaking with the action button held down.)
A problem with pulling doors is it's not obvious if doors are push or pull depending on the side you're on. I may make an exception for them so you don't have to let go of the action button. I'm also interested in letting doors be closed manually. Another new KF2 support feature is doors are held open until you navigate away from them. For that reason you might want to close them behind yourself ... for no reason other than I find if I want to do something and the game doesn't facilitate it I'm reminded I'm playing a game. For me the magic of King's Field is when it casts a spell that lulls me into a trance until I forget where I am in the real world. In that moment nothing matters and time could continue to pass by and I wouldn't know it. This can be seen as a destructive quality of video games, but I find this doesn't happen so easily and when it does it's very therapeutic if games aren't set up to be addictive never ending activities.
These new additions to the control system may seem frivolous but there are more practical additions and polish. I've already written about them but I will include what I can here again in omnibus fashion, another time. (For the record, for me the "frivolous" ones are the best part. They lend SOM a meditative quality. But I'd even like them for Armored Core's more arcade style format. Ultimately I'd like SOM to encompass everything so the controls aren't substantially different, so I don't have to think about them differently when I play them.)
