Sword of Moonlight > Devs

EXIT: Anti-aliasing announcement

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Holey Moley:
EDITED: I've reuploaded (SomEx.dll) to add a fix (see next paragraph) and added a warning for a change to the games as a side-effect of this patch.

The fix has to do with "neighbors" on different elevations and cells without tiles (perhaps because their tile is on another layer) having been incorrect in the initial patch yesterday. There may still be some issues in this area.

Holey Moley:
Bonus patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.5.zip

A few days ago I had an idea to work on giving definition to the other two map views that shown flat gray tiles, since they can be very disorienting, especially on a full map. A lot of unexpected things came of exploring/implementing this.

Before I forget, SOM_MAP now loads instantly. This is because it had kept two sets of icons, one turned 90 degrees. To make the turned versions it had used the notoriously bad GetPixel/SetPixelV APIs. I was surprised that using those to make turned icons could be the bulk of its load time, compared to opening/processing so many files (on an SSD drive) but it was. In the end I actually got rid of the second set altogether and used its memory to hold the gray versions of the tiles. To do this was a bit of a squeaker because the sideways tiles needed the PlgBlt API that doesn't offer any "ROPs" like the others, which is actually a problem for inverting the white tiles, but that's done the same way SOM inverts the multi-selection tiles. The 4 colored circle icons also had to be switched over to TransparentBlt to act like an overlay. Really this just removed the 4 corner pixels because there's very slight (unintentional) aliasing artifacts that are a different color, which I intend to remove from the language packs at some point.

Then because of this enhancement I had to finally add the right-button dragging function to the "checkpoints" screen. But I found that to be difficult without fully overhauling the new click logic (CtrlLock) on the main screen. And I found that even though I changed the button name to CtrlLock to be plainspoken, that it wasn't actually functioning as if the Ctrl button were automatically held down. I worked on this most of the morning today. It now works perfectly I think. And the Ctrl key state shouldn't be able to get stuck anymore.

The checkpoint screen now works with just the left button. It works better this way I think. It flips the first tile and sets drug over tiles to the same result. I think it would be nice to have a multi-select (Shift) mode for this. I can't tell if something is broken, but multi-select only seems to work with the keyboard arrow keys. I.e. shifting with the mouse doesn't form a multi-selection, but it can start one. I have to look into this, but I did all of this very fast and don't want to spend more time on it. It may be rough too, but I hope not. I just checked for keyboard input on the checkpoint screen, it seems to invert the tile, so that's good, now the mouse and keyboard use the same inversion logic.

Again, the big unexpected find/news here is load time in my book, but the rest is a big improvement too.

Holey Moley:
Important patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.5.zip

This is a must patch to fix some new/significant animation problems in this latest "demo" I somehow didn't notice before publishing it.

The big one is some animations like SOM's skeletons were drifting off center. (The reason for this has to do with converting 8-bit data to 255 versus -1 to detect the root joint that's supposed to stay pinned to 0,0,0.) A more humorous bug is the new scale factor was not updated for the arm_bicep extension so the arm had been missing above the elbow. (I had fixed it for the new MDL+MDO animations but at that point hadn't yet decided to move plain MDL over to a common scale factor.)

Holey Moley:
Bug in demo notice

ObjEdit (SOM_PRM) has a crash bug when opening a MDL file that I just learned about. I don't think I can easily fix this with a patch now.

I'm getting close to releasing it. But I still have a pretty long to-do list, so it could be a week or so...

It's really crazy how many little things there are to deal with in this area... they seem to never stop. I'm going to be very relieved to get this latest line of work somewhat behind me. It's been pretty miserable. Everything with the x2mdl project and MDL files has been really hard on me. Most of the troubles are just because of preserving the original set of MDL files. I've been working on this thing as much as I can stand at a time for 10 years, ever since the very beginning, but this time in particular has been rough... especially because it's time to tie up all the loose ends and pull it all together.

I even have a replacement for Assimp I started many years ago that I put a lot of work into, but this new release is still going to be using Assimp. I'm going to circle back and cleanup all of the code at some point. I just dread the work. If I don't do anything else in my life I want to preserve King's Field II for the future. Somehow that doesn't seem so bad.

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