simple machines forum

Because I listed Julian Assange on my recently prepared Patreon profile (http://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight) and because I caught the Underground fantasy biopic of him on Netflix, I've been on a little bit of an Assange tear of late.

I first wanted to know what the basis for Underground the movie was, since its more than a little fantastical on the face. That led me naturally to the book Underground (http://suelette.home.xs4all.nl/underground/justin/contents.html) and because Mr. Assange apparently did all but write the book his email address at the time was listed there, that led curiously to a choice two-letter domain name (iq.org) which struck me just for what it is (he must have grabbed that during the earliest days of the Internet.)


His blog is even better reading than his televised appearances. There is a genuine no nonsense human being at the top of their game in there. The blog is pretty much just a collection of creative writings and musing...

His much celebrated OkCupid dating service profile sums up the contents of the blog: "I spend a lot of time thinking about Changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery. Travel (33 countries). Structure of reality. Birth and death of the universe (physics background) Ontology. Chopping up human brains (neuroscience background)".


I've been reading the blog a post or two every day or so from beginning (oldest) to end. The post I just happened to read I wanted to share, because I think it truly captures the struggle I want to represent between Guyra and Seath:

Mon 17 Jul 2006 : Arrows for false gods

Disagreement is a good spur for conversation, but I don't know where to begin with your claim. People gain pleasure and power in spreading certain beliefs and certain beliefs are easy to spread. They don't look for the truth because they want to preserve this pleasure. Truth is rarely important in human affairs and if you want to shift your definition the only truth is power over reality. But it was the will to truth pouring its acid over the false beauty of gods and kings that guided us out of the miasma of the dark ages. You are not stupid. You are perfectly capable of piercing your claim, but you choose not to, since, like most people, you'd prefer to please and deceive.

By 'you' I mean the entire ensemble, not merely that part which processes words. To be human is to deceive. All human beings are great self deceivers, but this is not the innocent charm of the naively hopeful. They deceive themselves so that they may deceive others and having tasted this pleasure return to lap at its fountain. See Gregory Bateman. Your belief in various kinds of unsubstantiated newage hokey that you could easily shoot down is a reflection of this underlaying tendency. How many times have you read "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are more important to most people than truth, which should not be as a surprise, because natural selection selects on physically realised existence, not on platonic ideals.

But then as we fall back into the miasma, the shadow world of ghosts and distortions a miracle rises; everywhere before self interest is known, people yearn to know where its compass points and then people hunger for the truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then the truth can set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, to remove the ring from their noses, to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over guilt. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, the liberators and martyrs of truth, those Voltairs, Galileo's, and Principia's of truth, those brutal driven obsessed miners of reality, those serial killers of delusion smashing the whole rotten edifice till all ruins and the seeds of the new.

Buried in there Guyra is the long game, the great project of the universe, the arc of the moral universe as it is often expressed. And Seath, it is the "only truth is power over reality". In other words, the manipulation of reality. You can understand this as machines like computers that manipulate the laws of reality to an end, but I don't think that is the true intent here in this haphazard posting.... my surface reading anyway is this is about the twisting of actors' perception of reality to some end. In other words, the manipulation of people, not reality.

People vs. reality, or consciousness vs. the necessarily arbitrary rules governing the universe that it participates in. Even in the title of this posting, the "False Gods" I think there is something else to consider. If Seath is a false god, deceiving, then what is Guyra but a second order false god? in so far as the reality it seeks out, like physicists seek out, is secondary. Its true it can be immensely useful business, but to invest yourself in the arrogance of the business, as so many public figures like Steven Hawkings do, is no less delusions than Seath's strange pleasures are illusions.

In any event, as grand narratives go, this is as good as it gets IMO.


PS: In case this sounds too far out, know that It's pretty much the same arrangement as in Milias' Conan The Barbarian. Seath/Set is like Jones' character, Thulsa Doom I think, and Conan's nihilistic down to earth god "Crom" is straight up Guyra's alley (the riddle of steel and so on)

For the next release I am working a new project settings editor for SOM_EDIT. It can be seen in some recent attachments.

Things are going pretty well. Today I realized that since it uses a tree setup like SOM_MAP, it's going to have to have icons like SOM_MAP does. I don't seem to be very good at making icons, so it's something I try to avoid. But I realized as always in this world it comes down to me doing the work.

I don't like SOM_MAP's icons. I don't think they are befitting SOM, or really worthy of it. So before I could work on SOM_EDIT's icons, I had to make new icons for SOM_MAP...

I wanted to make something generic for the first icon set. If I could I didn't even want it to be fantasy based. But I could really think of anything not fantasy based that would be more generic. And anyway, what I ended up doing was just changing the background colour in the 3D views to white, and taking screenshots of SOM's models, and then scaling those down to 16x16 pixels!

This sounds nuts, but it actually came out quite well. The trick is picking the right models. They need to be generic, and fill as much space as possible, and look good on a white background. And ideally have good colour contrast.

I am quite happy with the ones I settled on. I think they are pretty generic, even to SOM, since they don't pick the models you might expect. I am especially happy with the choice for an enemy icon. It looks even better in the second screenshot, which adds contrast to it. It really captures the generic enemy feel I think, without being too specific. I like the NPC in that sense too...

The second screen is how the icons look in SOM_MAP. I can probably work on extensions to improve the colors, but I actually like the changes, especially to the enemy and NPC icon. The NPC becomes especially generic, it could be just about anything. It's not male or female. It could be a knight, a matron, or a priest.


In any event. These will be in the next release. The old icons will be relegate to the From Software language/theme pack for posterity sake. This is something I wanted to do way back on the first release that made improvement to the tools, but editing the icons was just too scary. I could see it going nowhere and consuming a lot of my time. This tack only took an hour or so and went along very smoothly.

Dark Souls, let me introduce you to Metal Wolf Chaos

With this record there's no way I'm ever going to own a current gen console. I'm still ashamed to own a previous generation PS3, even though I'm finally getting some regular use out of it as a Netflix player.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/134635-Xbox-One-PS4-Waste-400-Million-Annually-in-Standby-Mode

http://www.nrdc.org/energy/game-consoles/default.asp
http://www.nrdc.org/energy/game-consoles/files/video-game-consoles-IB.pdf

I kind of covet the Nintendo Virtual Console because I just can't be bothered to deal with emulators anymore, and because the selection is dismal on the PlayStation. I kind of wanted a Wii a little while back, but they are region locked, and no longer play GameCube games, so I just forgot about the whole idea.

Still Nintendo is the only responsible party here. I'd probably be doing good to replace the PS3 with a Wii U for watching Netflix, but I don't know where I'd put the thing, and its probably two or three times more expensive than what I'd be willing to cough up for it. Consoles are pretty much dead to me. And I don't think I'm alone (for a change)

I am rereading old topics tonight for ideas.

Anyway, I bet this has been a long post. And I bet you are wondering what the hell conjured this up out of me. It's actually this...


For a long time people have been thinking. Video games are becoming more than just games. We need a new word to describe this nascent phenomenon that will soon begin consuming all of the arts and if we are not careful, reality as we know it.

I've always thought we should just ditch the goggles concept of 90s "virtual reality" and call it all VR. Because that's what it is. Even Tetris is a reality, goggles or no goggles, or piped directly into your brainpan. Its a reality. But it occurred to me this afternoon that we have a better word, if only for its brevity, in "irreality"...

And an abbreviation does not a word make. So I vote, as the art of video games matures, and as we begin to see all forms of storytelling media being developed with the same tools used to develop video games, because make no bones about it, it will just be a thousand times more economical to do so, and there will be a thousands times more people who will therefore be able to afford to do so...

We slowly begin to refer to this stuff as "irreality". The word itself is already strictly limited to the subject of fantasy, fantasy fiction almost exclusively. So there is no ambiguity in terms of terms like hallucination or surreality to be had

These are things I've grappled with for a while. I think I have an answer now, and its a lot more pedestrian I think, but good. It comes out of an essay I wrote for a Patreon account/whatever for myself and this work, that is now linked to on the Support page of this website.

Basically my concept now, and I think this is final, for the "graphic novel" equivalent of video games is "action adventure". Not action-adventure game, just plain action adventure. Like video->action game->adventure.

I think this is a new medium that permanently take the game out of games. If a game has game-like elements then it's not a pure action-adventure (it's an action-adventure game)


This works because anything that embeds you in a story is an Adventure by definition. And because its real-time and fully 3D (these are the base requirements for this medium) it will always entail Action.

If you want to shorten it, it just becomes Adventure. We'll know what people mean because no one in their right mind goes on adventures anymore!


Also, as for my stance on how to enmesh Sword of Moonlight as deep into literature as possible. My feelings are that the base world of King's Field must be literary. So it must be generated from literature. I think there are two main strains of modern literature and modern culture that are undeniable, the obvious winners.

I think that's religion pretty much, but especially the Abrahamic kinds. Full disclosure, I'm not religious, but I know when to admit defeat. And I think vampires. There has to be vampires. In fact I saw Shadow of the Vampire for the first time last night, and I watched Nosferatu again afterwards on Netflix to see if it was really anything like SOTV, because that's not how I remembered it at all...

And of course, if you have vampires you necessarily have the religions, because their weaknesses are crosses and stuff, and there is just no other way to explain that kind of thing. But the reason I focus down on these is not because I am a huge fan, but because I think the King's Field universe must be virtual, so my concept of it is is nothing in it is real. It's like if you took a library and put in in a blender and fed that smoothie to a super computer and asked it to turn it into the coolest thing it can!

That's pretty much it for me. My working concept, and I think final concept, is the super computer crunches all of the literature and decides to create the King's Field verse, which is like our world, since our world/literature is the input, but it isn't. All of the dragons and really everything in the universe is really just the dragon in revelations who falls down to earth, and actually is the earth. And the dragon is kicked down by the other dragons in heaven, which is something you can never see since its outside the creation. The dragons are angels, and there is really no distinction, the words are interchangeable. Their true forms are dragons. If they appear as men/women I believe they should not have wings, they don't need them, and that looks silly.

The red dragon that is all of creation / Sylval is kicked out of heaven by archangel Michael whose weapons are the Moonlight and Dark Slayer. Both of those weapons are pulled into creation by the dragon. And when the universe ends, everything happens in reverse, the dragons all coalesce back into Sylval, and try again to enter heaven, only to be kicked out again, so that a feedback loop is formed and every repeat of the cycle feeds back into the next.

After so many cycles the super computer has pretty much lost track of that the Moonlight and Dark Slayer were originally the Holy Spear and Grail from legends of Christianity that it read about in a lot of the literature that it used to initialize the universe. And the "true cross" is when the Moonlight and Dark Slayer are combined...

And this explains why crosses freakout vampires. Because after the initial formation of the universe everything eventually settles down, but the vampires still remain from the old world (they have ground up shards of the Dark Slayer that runs through their bloodstream, and that's what makes them immortal/magical like the old world)

My other rationale is I want to create a universe that is as compatible as possible with Hideyuki Kikuchi's novels, since I think they are perfect fits for King's Field. They have Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water when it comes to magic like King's Field. And I think his stuff is about a century ahead of its time, and so perfectly fit for the 21st century. He's basically obsessed with vampires since he was a kid, but does write other things.


PS: Vampires are not supposed to have shadows! But since that's really hard to do on a movie set most vampires in film have shadows. But games / digital media shouldn't have that problem at all.

Okay, so I'm going to assume the patch fixes this until I hear otherwise.

BTW, there was a new Sticky thread added for bug reports (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=179.0)

It's fine if you don't use it, but it will add to your post count, which I guess might make you appear to be a more participatory member.


I'm curious if you've been able to figure out the .SOM file, or if you are just using the undoctored artwork that comes with SOM for now?

Right now I am working towards adding that Settings dialog to SOM_EDIT, which will have a GUI for the SOM file. But first I have to focus on language pack delivery.

FYI: I just noticed that the "slip" effect that basically keeps you from hovering out over a ledge is broken... most likely by this release, particularly the part that changes up how the ceiling is interacted with.

I'll look into it tomorrow, hopefully nothing will stand in the way of restoring the effect. I've noticed this for a while actually but didn't realize what was happening since I was noticing it when fighting with the ceiling.

Strikeout: player_character_slip was disabled in the configuration file (same story as above)

Found a surprising bug today around locale selection. It turned out that do_use_builtin_english_by_default was being applied to Japanese computers!

I don't know how this managed to go so long without being caught by myself, but it was exacerbated by the fact that if there is not a LANG folder then the system locale is used, which is more often the case for me. Plus if there is a Japanese translation file in the LANG folder the bug was well hidden also.

So it basically wasn't setup correctly, but appeared to be correct under both of those conditions. It's only with an empty dummy LANG folder that the problem revealed itself.


Today I also added a trick to the Ex.ini file, so you can reset an extension to its default behavior (which can sometimes be more complex than a simple default value) by writing the extension with a . (period) directly in front of it. I've wanted to do this for a while, but could not arrive at a syntax that agreed with me.

I call this hiding the extension. Like on many computers files that begin with a period (.) are hidden. And I plan on adding the same functionality for whole sections at some point, but there's no rush.


PS: I also changed the English for the Arrange Inventory screen to say Pack and Unpack when asking for confirmation.