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EXIT: There's no place like home

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Holey Moley:
Full disclosure:

Over the holidays I had to find a replacement for my television and happened across a decent deal on a PlayStation 4 for $200 minus a few bundled games.

The last few days I've been playing Witcher III. I don't know if I will stick with it, but I've put well over ten hours into it. At least. I can't say if I've enjoyed myself or not, but it's addictive in a way that may or may not be a net positive thing. Anyway, to the degree I play a game it naturally subtracts from my spare time to work on Sword of Moonlight stuff.

So if it seems slower than normal around here it's a real possibility I'm dividing my time with a game right now. I haven't played any games in a few years or more. So I'm probably owed some time off. I have a handful of games at my disposal, but I don't usually play a game for long nowadays. I'm really more into Japanese games, and have never liked English games for the most part. But Japanese games have just gotten stupid for like 10yrs and counting so, so I haven't been playing many games, which is probably a good thing... especially for Sword of Moonlight.

EDITED: For the record, it cuts in my time for other things too. It's not just SOM bearing the downtime. I'm also a little burned out right now, so I'm doing my best to do programming work little by little, sometimes failing on a day to day basis.

P.S. I will say I don't believe the way games like Witcher are major time sinks is the way games should be. I think it's really a very shallow experience. I'm a little drawn to it because its set up is a lot like Vampire Hunter D, I won't lie. But without any of D's coolness. Functionally the characters are virtually identical. The stakes are just radically different. No pun intended. I think an ideal King's Field game is very short and tight lipped by comparison. Witcher just leads you along giving you things to do dividing half of its time with long-winded questionably executed talk sequences. Any of its scenarios could be entire games in themselves if they were truly satisfying. Well, I'm lucky since most are nominating Witcher as the game of the decade. Since I'm not bowled over I shouldn't have to sift through the rest of the decade's offerings once I'm done with it.

Holey Moley:
Bi-weekly update:

I'm (still) very slowly working on the 3D modeling software project. I'm very happy with how it's coming along, but it does feel like I'm not getting a whole lot done. Maybe that's just what a quality job feels like. I do work slowing and methodically. I'm most impressed with the look-and-feel of it, which makes me glad because that's something I'm no good at predicting or planning for. It surprises me.

I'm now a co-moderator in the King's Field subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/
https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/comments/ei2rw7/looks_like_someone_should_takeover_rkingsfield_to/

This came about only because Reddit has thrown out its old theming facilities in favor of an incompatible system, that left the subreddit's theme in a generic state that looked like nobody cares for it. So I threw in my hat.

Winter is harsh, I think it slows me down. My Witcher III game is around level 16. I don't know how many hours or if I've even enjoyed myself or if I will forget it exists at any moment. It's perfectly bland and inoffensive. I don't know what to make of it. I think games shouldn't take so long to complete. At least with old school JRPG titles the scenarios felt memorable. I can't say anything about Witcher is memorable. I think it knows that if anything about itself were memorable it would undermine its project as a whole, of seeming to walk a very fine line of not putting you off while keeping you just curious enough about what might happen next. It feels insidious.

Holey Moley:
Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.12.zip

This patch adds a way to swap the controller buttons in the screens that only use the first four buttons. It occurred to me that SOM probably uses the Japanese sense and so US players may find it difficult to deal with. (I never even noticed because I'd had imported PlayStations and other consoles for all my adult life.)

The system is designed to be simple and easy to discover, so you just press the 5th or 6th button which is usually L1 and R1 I think, and those will swap what's normally the 1st and 2nd or 3rd and 4th buttons.

Except there is custom remapping built-in for Sony's DualShock4 because it's so weird, so it will have the same effect but it uses 2nd and 3rd and 1st and 4th. Which is bonkers. The axis mapping is just as bonkers... it's like Sony made it hostile on purpose.

EDITED: For the record I don't actually know to what degree this affects people. I think that the confirm button is simply the 1st button, and I can't remember what that was for the Xbox controller I had when I added Xbox support. I think probably the DualShock4 support will assign confirm to O which is the Japanese convention. I'm sure this feature is useful in that case. I could swap that. But SOM is technically Japanese.

I just hope the feature doesn't cause problems for people who accidentally/habitually press the L1 and R1 buttons. If so I will have to add a way to disable it.

Holey Moley:
Patch

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.2.12.zip

A new feature I'm looking into (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=301) instantly bore fruit after it caused me to stumble upon a bug that this patch is intended to correct. The glitch happens when you push the action button up against a climbable surface but instead of letting go you hold the button until it's too late to be able to climb. That pretty much describes the feature I'm working on, except it's limited to climbable platforms. I never noticed the problem because I guess I never tried to do that. There's not real reason to right now. The unwanted behavior is you kind of sink into the wall and get violently spat back out. Luckily the fix doesn't have any visible disturbance, which is a good sign for the feature I'm working on. I thought it might be noticeable even after a fix. You never know. With controls different kinds of maneuvers are always coming into conflict with others. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons you can't have it both ways.

I always drop everything to fix a bug. It was a good reintroduction to my code. It takes me a while to reaquaint myself after a prolonged absence.

ALSO this patch happens to include some new extensions that add a fog effect to the volume based transparency feature described here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=295.msg2778#msg2778)

The fog is like the color fog in the distance except for the likes of underwater or otherwise transparent things that use these new [Volume] extensions. It can make a body of water appear darker in its depths or make it appear muddy as if there is a cloud of sediments that renders the water to appear as a single color as opposed to a dynamic surface.

EDITED: I had to reupload the patch after realizing a last second change I made was wrong WRT the unrelated the crouching feature. I should've just left it alone. But I'm glad I realized the mistake. (I'm glad how my brain consistently informs me of my mistakes after a nights rest!! I should probably only upload the day after.)

Holey Moley:
I found a rendering bug in the Volume demo yesterday. I thought I would get to it today but didn't make it past one item on my to-do list.

I think I fixed a problem with the mouse cursor not always being available depending on how things start out desktop layout wise. That got me looking at the mouse cursor code and gave me an idea to try to use it to put a crosshair cursor in the middle of the screen by double-clicking to use the mouse to play instead of single clicking. I don't recommend the mouse but it's useful for doing work sometimes. It's actually feels pretty good these days. That is mainly a result of my programming some pretty involved stuff to smooth over the 7 gait analog system so you hopefully can't tell it's just 7 gaits, like 7 bicycle speeds. Or technically 7.5.

I thought a crosshair might come in handy for something to someone. It jiggles by 1 pixel on my system when you move the mouse. It seems unnecessary. Maybe that's so you know the mouse battery isn't dead. I don't know. It can be used with a controller and I mapped the H key to it.

I think I noticed some other issues. The mouse wheel system always seemed a little amiss to me. That may have been because of a stray test that shouldn't have been. I've made it so it always works and it works the same with the weak capture mode. It's used to enter the strong-capture mode. It's like a safety lock. Basically the lock works the same now, but engaging it after unlocking enters the strong-capture mode no differently.

Finally I noticed the F10 key acting weird. That may be a new development, but I went to some length to be able to use it. Adding double-click to the mix turned out to be time consuming too. F10 is actually a special key. It seems to be used to reclaim your mouse cursor. The program isn't told when it's released and when it is released Windows seems to revert the cursor to its state before it was pressed. But I was able to control the cursor at least while pressed. Then I was able to program a backdoor into the DirectInput code that has more "direct" access to keys for games. And so I was able to make it act more friendly I think. It's function is similar to the Alt key, but I think some time ago I decided to make it behave like the mouse wheel feature instead, so that you have a manual way to access it without a mouse with a wheel. It's still pretty similar to Alt, but not identical. The main difference after all my work is when pressed it stays on the screen in the same state after F10 is released, like Alt would.

In many programs F10 acts like Alt for accessing the classic menu bar. I'm not sure what the history behind that is.

I put up a demo the other day so I may not patch this release again and instead opt to patch the demo and report it here. (The Volume demo looks fine except on some spots in some levels, i.e. most the time it works by accident.)

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