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:
(http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Binocular-Gap.png)
[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.
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.
[Editor]
;Increase tools' fonts 30%.
height_adjustment = 1.3*1_
(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 (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.