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EXIT: Let there be light

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Holey Moley:

--- Quote from: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/archives/sword-of-moonlight/2017/10/let-there-be-light/ ---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 Mortheia’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.
--- End quote ---

Read more about Moratheia here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=154.0)

Holey Moley:

--- Quote from: http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/archives/sword-of-moonlight/2018/05/let-there-be-light-2/ ---Here’s an interesting stopgap release — it’s not what I’d planned, and it’s a demonstration first-and-foremost — but it’s also an official release, because it includes some of the best performance enhancements for Windows 7 and later Windows, and fixes some bugs that had arrived too late to be patched. I’ve been hard at work ever since I acquired a PlayStation VR in order to apply it to Sword Of Moonlight, but got taken off guard by the headset’s enchanting home-theater mode. (More on it later.)

There are so many possible releases, all up in the air, right now, never mind VR; Nevertheless, in the last several days it’s been the only thing I can think about. I expected to release a full PlayStation VR demonstration, except for the headset that I received seemed to have apparent display anomalies that forced me to send it back for a replacement, and so in the meantime I could only finish the demonstration’s visual component:



[text in center was undoubled at the time this picture was taken]
I felt desperate to achieve a visual. I went to lengths I wouldn’t normally to make it work on my (puny) workstation. And now that it works (including double-vision and nontrivial lens distortion effects) and does so on an inexpensive, integrated chip in a box that will fit in the palm of your hand, no less, it’s still only half as exhilarating as the ability for Sword Of Moonlight to do this at all, without changing how it works in some more fundamental way. It is doing so now not by summoning raw horsepower but by achieving a clean, steady frame-rate, for the first time in its so far brief history.

Needless to say this has profound implications for games, even if surely, these problems would be solved some day, what’s important is now is that day, and the problems are no longer, or at least, have been not insufficiently mitigated for the time being.
--- End quote ---

For the record, I've chose to file this blog post under the same title of this earlier one from last year. They are both milestones on the way to Moratheia being a full-fledged game if it gets its act together, but my main inspiration is that the scenes pictured happen to be the same exact locale. Both posts deal with critical milestones... in fact if not for the breathtaking clipper developments from back then, I'm not sure SOM would be smooth enough for VR. But now it may well be some of the best VR in existence!

Before I forget, I wanted to add that last-moment I figured out how to change the "F3" mode to let you experience the full game without cutting off effects from contact with monsters. This is something I wanted to do since the subject of the original post but could not yet formulate how to do it. (It's done by preempting the special "system" DEATH event.)

Also, because the frame-rate is much more regular, do_aa is looking a lot better, and appears much more acceptable in full color mode (8-bits per RGB component) and in VR mode.


EDITED: Also, the following code can be added to the Ex.ini file to make the tools larger... or technically it's to make their text labels easier to read on a VR display.


--- Quote from: Ex.ini (excerpt) ---[Editor]

;Increase tools' fonts 30%.
height_adjustment = 1.3*1_
--- End quote ---

(Note, I don't know if 1_ is ideal form, but it's shorthand for _[1] which you might find easier to read. It looks better for counters that use c than for function parameters that use _.)

P.S. New release is here (http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.4.zip) but SVN Update also includes the new SomEx.dll file. But you'll likely still be prompted to Update it. I update the files in the TOOL folder from time to time because I expect new users to have some initial confusion about the update process, and so may not get their files up-to-date.

Holey Moley:
VR Instructions

F2 enters/exits stereo mode. This is saved as stereo in the INI file.  I think it will work without issue if your PC can truly output to 2 monitors (I recommend clone mode) and I've seen some evidence that the USB port may need to be the newer/faster USB3.0 type, but I don't know this for certain.

https://github.com/gusmanb/PSVRFramework/releases has a tool for controlling your PSVR on Windows. You want the Toolbox and DriversPackage downloads. Without this, you cannot put the headset into VR mode. While you're at it though, try playing SOM with the home-theater mode. That's the best experience I've ever had playing a first-person game hands down. It's not VR like in the articles you may've read, but it's better in my book, with minimal to no nausea, etc.

In stereo mode, Alt+F3 (or just F3 if not using the function overlay) changes the "Binocular Gap" setting, which is a little bit experimental at this stage. In this build it represents your "IPD" but is not necessarily a fixed measurement. The PSVR is supposed to have 64mm between the lenses. And if you set this to 15 it's supposed to match that. But I'm not 100% certain it lines up with the in-game camera, but it looks as though it does. (EDITED: Woops, forgot to explain Alt+Shift+F3 or alternatively F1... see Reply #3!)

It is the space between the hero's eyes... but you can set it to less or more than your own to experience a more or less pronounced 3D effect, where in theory 1=1mm. The value 0 is special, in that instead of being 49mm it is 0mm, or "mono" or what a cyclops sees, or what covering one eye might see if that eye was in the middle of your face. I don't believe this is an uncomfortable setting, and it may well be the most comfortable setting.

(Other than the hole at 0 you can override the built-in limit by hand editing the INI file.)

This demo doesn't interface with the headset. So it doesn't know where you are looking. You just have to mimic what you are putting into the controller, or don't look around. Or if you don't have a headset, just see if it runs at 60fps/smoothly on your PC or not.


P.S. In stereo mode there is extensive color correction to match my unit's color. But I've returned the headset, so it's possible that its color is not common to all PSVRs. I will know more when I get a second headset. The color wasn't among the reasons I eventually decided to exchange it. But it was a major disappointment that I only began to notice in my final days with it. Honestly, if I had to choose between the defects for which I returned it, and having correct color, I would choose the color....

But the odd thing is, the home-theater mode color does match my monitors. So either it's applying color correction, or the VR mode color is completely uncalibrated or possibly even deliberately hobbled by Sony to make it difficult to use with devices not its own.

Holey Moley:
EDITED: FORGOT TO ADD that the F3 setting goes from 0 to 30, but it doesn't go backward (it's a work in progress) so that originally I set it up for Shift to go backward, but that only works if you use Alt+Shift+F3... because Shift is the keyboard way to "attack" so last minute I made F1 go backward also, but that is likely a temporary arrangement.

(Using F4 isn't an option because Alt+F4 is universal for quitting out of software.)

This setting repeats, so you can hold the button down, and if you assign it to a macro/button it's very easy to use with the controller. But in a real life situation I'm not sure sacrificing two face buttons is worth it. But it can help to figure out what setting you think you might like... but here's the thing about that...

Basically our eyes are really good at combining two images, so they will combine anything you throw at them. I doubt it matters if they are exact, and you might want to just pick a setting that gives you the degree of effect you want.

When I first started doing tests, I used basically a cyclops mode with parallax, that I think would let me basically adjust the focal-length, independent of cropping) and I would set the length to very large numbers, so it was as if things in the distance were much closer than they are. It created the sensation that I was a very small person, even though nothing changed in terms of height. I believe this is less about FOV and instead has to do with the fact that our brains use the difference in the two pictures (per eye) to judge their distance from things, and so even though I was seeing the same thing, my brain was telling me it was closer or further away (although it was not exactly the same because the shear angle was changing, as if on either side of my nose.)

In any case, in the current set up, the focal length is "infinite" meaning the eyes are looking straight forward. This is actually how almost all VR games/demos work right now, and is considered best practice for not causing discomfort. But I still, later on, want to do experiments with dynamic focal lengths... in which case what I plan to set up is to change the focal length based on how far away a cluster of pixels in the center of the screen are. (IOW, depending on what you are looking at, the game will match what your eyes should be doing in real life... in this future mode. I think this will work well, or I'd be surprised if it doesn't, because the PSVR is already like wearing blinders... your eyes can't exactly roam, and are given every incentive not to.)

Holey Moley:
Minor Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.4.zip

I had some problems with pressing Alt while ducking causing the character to stand up. So I made some changes, and I realized that I went too far, because Alt+Shift was letting the Attack occur, which I already decided way-back-when was not going to be allowed... so Alt is no longer viable for regular play, and while it can access different kinds of movement (lateral/vertical) it's not for play but just for navigating in the playtest context.

Bottom line, is Shift is too useful as a modifier to completely commit it to Attack, and playing with Alt is neither fun nor viable, and so not worth maintaining. Alt+Shift opens the System Menu (click icon in title bar.)

P.S. The one improvement this release makes, is pressing Alt while holding down the Action button (space-bar) to duck, etc. no longer stands up. This is important when Alt is used by "macros" (i.e. assigning key combinations to virtual buttons.)

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