simple machines forum

I apologize, it's taken me a long time to crank this out. I ran into a couple bugs that were hard to hunt down with my diminished schedule.

You should use SVN Update to get SomEx.csv to apply this kind of update.

Direct download: http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.4.2.zip (advanced)

I'm trying to cleanup my act. This board is the new main board. I hope everyone will feel free to use it as much as possible

I'm excited to announce, I got a job, I don't got a paycheck, but one should be around the corner. Anyway, I am trying to pick up the pieces of my work here. I'm going to be focusing on my King's Field II project in my off hours, whenever I can. My life has been in upheaval for a while, and this post is just to set the record straight. Those who've followed me the past few months know things have been crazy, crazy, crazy. Okay, okay. I don't know if I can hit that 2025 deadline, but my plans are to work until 2025 at a minimum. I'm working 30hrs a week. I think I can keep my medicaid this way, since the restaurant I'm working at doesn't have health insurance. And that's about all I can say.

I have done a little bit of work on order-independent transparency, since that is what I was working on when I got blindsided. It's one of the hardest problems I've faced, and it kicked my butt back then. But I'm trying to get back on that horse in the meantime. I want to make my demo more well rounded, and I want to make Sword of Moonlight (here) easier to setup. I'm dedicated. If I'm going to pull this off I have to work harder than I was and sleep less.

Update: I found a solution for order-independent transparency (same day!)

BTW, I figured out (on my own) a solution for the transparency problem. It took some trial and error, but pretty much I've made it to use the closet vertex, and all triangles using that vertex are BSP sorted (without cutting) (using the code I'd already set up for this) and it just kind of works, good enough. I've not seen any problems yet. But I need to do a lot of cleanup and fix a few things that need work.

After that (hopefully in a few days) I'm going to try to make a plain ZIP[1] download for SOM. It's not the recommended way, but a lot of people have begged me to do this for a while. It will have a TortoiseSVN database built into it, but you'll still have to install that if you want to update. I won't be keeping it up-to-date.

[1] Because ZIP isn't good for small files, I may look into other ZIP formats. This may not be easier than just using TortoiseSVN, or I might just use ZIP anyway.

So what's next?

Here lately I've been indecisive on what to work on next for SOM. There are a number of projects I know I should be doing but I just feel like I don't want to do them now, maybe lingering effects of burnout from earlier in the year. Then I've got a list of large projects and small projects.

On the "large" front I feel like 2 or 3 seem possible. First I think this is what I may look at next, it is to sort/split transparent triangles for more correct/stable transparency blending. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. The other projects seem related, that is to finally make a UI for Exselector, or rewrite/refactor the OpenGL font/text rendering code I have (it's based on a Github hosted project called nanovg) which I figure a UI project might want to do first. There's reason it has to be done, but I just have a bad feeling about this code and it will be needed for the UI project.

As for the "small", I'm probably forgetting something, but I think it might be a good idea to develop code for animation that doesn't use a fixed integer time signature. That's because it's a problem for high frame rate displays and VR sets. I could look at reducing load on BGM changes, since that is more likely to hiccup during/after the new seamless map changes. I think I should return to working on NPC flying/swimming extensions for my KFII demo. I ended up dropping the ball on that last year. I might look at detecting when monsters are walking directly into obstacles (not progressing) and make them turn to seem less robotic.

This is just a list of possibilities I can refer back to. Motivation has been a problem for me lately. Don't worry. I usually mix small projects in with a bigger project. I just have to write these down because I have to pick something to start work on soon. I definitely have some art work to do on my KFII project, but I just don't feel up to it yet. I'll have to focus on that before long though. Possibly until the end of the year. I think many of these projects are the things I wanted to get into the demo this year.

SVN Update

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/Exselector.dll/0.0.0.2.zip
http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/Sword-of-Moonlight/tool/Exselector.csv

I've added an updater file so Exselector.dll will be downloaded and used if triggered. I'll probably add a backup copy of this DLL in the next release.

P.S. I'm not sure what I'm doing with myself right now. I know I have to get back on the horse. I'm thinking that I need to finish the non-KF2 style onscreen display elements and make that a new release, and then I'm thinking I should probably work on switching the DATA/MAP folder over to using the new art system. That requires a project to add a feature to x2mdl.dll to tessellate split-level tiles in a way that works for the do_aa extension. Choosing what to work on next is always a bit unnerving. It takes a little time for intuition to kick into gear.

Patch (SOM_MAP)

http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/SomEx.dll/1.2.3.6.zip

This fixes a problem with the Add button in SOM_MAP when adding monsters and NPCs on a fresh screen. I put in some new stringent error handling code fairly recently that "returned" the wrong value (0 instead of -1) and also the X and Y rotation fields needed to be initialized to 0 to pass this error checking for better or worse.

Note, this patch has the VR code for my current KF2 demo, but it doesn't have code for the normal HP gauge and compass. The KF2 demo uses an alternative HUD that's like the PlayStation trilogy's. So I still have to work on those. When I finish them there will be a new release, and it will change the default Ex.ini file to use the new OpenGL mode that the demo uses.

EDITED: Thanks to JackTheRipper for spotting this.

Fix

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/x2mdl.zip
http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/x2mdl.dll/1.0.0.2.zip

I've updated the x2mdl.exe file in these to fix a bug when converting MDL files into MM3D files that outputs 1 pixel textures if the files already exist.

Unrelated, FWIW I've also updated https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases to fix glitches in the scroll bar pixels, and a couple other minor bugs. I've also added a mantis-model.zip file in order to supply a test model to play with. It's the same as SOM's DATA/ENEMY/MODEL/E019.MM3D file.

MM3D upgrade

More info: https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/issues/1#issuecomment-1147825671

Download: https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/download/win32-dec-2021/mm3d-portable.zip

Edited: A lot of hotkeys are remapped. The Help->About menu now has a "Tip" to clear out the keycfg.ini file, and the hyperlink to its URL should now open it into your text editor that's assigned to the INI extension.

This is a substantial upgrade I've been focusing on pretty much since the new KF2 demo I published on the eve of May 1. I don't like the thought that it took me a month to prepare this, but I don't know what else I've been doing.

This model editor is becoming more mature. I'm happy with how the menus and hotkeys have turned out. The main focus of this update is a graph based animation editor, but it's really pretty basic. Maybe the extras are more impressive, but it was the editor that took up the bulk of my time preparing this. There's just so many little details involved that you wouldn't think of.

VR update

RE the last post, in the past 2 days I had to stop using my old work PC because I'm hoping its little CR2032 watch battery died. So I finally had to get set up with the new PC since it's going to take some soldering to replace that battery. I'll be sad if that doesn't fix that PC up, but I'm pretty well situated with the new PC now.

I've been trying to finish up a project that's turned into quite a slog, to add some animation enhancements to the software I use to work with animation models. I think I'll have it finished and published tomorrow. I didn't get as far as I wanted with it. Instead I had to stick with it as long as it took to get to an initial stopping point. I'm planning to switch gears to VR work immediately after I'm done with that. It should be interesting.

I may also be playing some VR, I'm not sure. I got a game for cheap off the PS4 that is Doom 3 in VR. It looks like the whole game plus some expansion campaigns. I did own and play Doom 3. I remember the last boss was a big disappointment. But that means I did finish it. I wonder if I'll still enjoy it or not. In theory I could even get some VR games for the PC now. I'm not sure what's out there.

SVN Update

I've updated the hard animation type MM3D models to remove the last frame and remove redundant key frames. The latter point is nice because it makes it practical to edit the animations or reuse them as a starting point for making new or customized models.

I had to leave most of the SFX models alone apart from the final frame because they weren't coming out right. Probably because they turn a full 360 degrees. I have to look into it but I'm burnt out on this for now. I couldn't bring myself to go through and check every animation for correctness, and I know there are still some redundant key frames in there that could probably be verified/removed manually. I figure if there are any problems (I saw none) they'll just have to be stumbled over over time as usual.

In order to do this I had to recalculate the lighting surface normals, and I'm not sure what the MM3D software generates is an improvement. It has to use its normals if the file is saved. If it had occurred to me before I'd done most of the data entry I may have had set up a new "utility" that could have preserved the original normals. But I don't think it's that big of deal, and really the models need manual work to add smoothing groups to them. Low-poly models are hard to use any kind of automatic normal generation system with. I'd even like to add facilities for hand tweaking normals, to make this editor a beast for low-poly work.

The MM3D software is becoming pretty mature. I've been sitting on what would be a new release for a while. I also found a bug in x2mdl.exe for making MM3D files that overwrites existing textures with a 1x1 image. I have to publish a patch ASAP but I don't believe anyone is using it for this. Mostly this is for converting SOM's proprietary file formats into MM3D files.