October was a good month for Sword of Moonlight. It started with an unscheduled release that turned into possibly the most consequential yet, and because of it I was able to really dig in to Moratheia’s 2.1 demonstration (pictured) resulting in a string of “patch” alerts on the back of the new release, the likes that can only come about from many hours of genuine, uninterrupted play.

Combined with the first surprise release from late this year, in Moratheia’s project Sword of Moonlight appears able to make a fully professional showing. The earlier release removes pixellation from detailed images that form cutout shapes that are applied to two-sided paper thin polygon shapes. It sounds like a cheap effect, but Moratheia makes use of this to great effect, as can be seen in its many fine tree limbs (pictured) and grasses. The second surprise release is more or less an omnibus that started with the simple objective of extending the kind of geometry that can be walked over without encountering glitches, but would snowball to enhance and make perfect the solidity of Sword of Moonlight’s artistic worlds.

Furthermore, in this process, insidious, showstopping bugs were isolated and eliminated from Mortheia’s demo.

I believe that very soon Sword of Moonlight will be suitable to stage a competitive commercial offering. Moratheia appears poised to be the first such offering. That said, that Moratheia exists at all is nothing to sneeze at. Sword of Moonlight is very user-friendly, but also many parts of it are strictly off limits to users, and so I cannot endorse its fitness as a complete product at this time, and do not expect to be able to do so any day soon. Nevertheless, Moratheia is living proof that with enough patience and know-how, Sword of Moonlight can deliver very impressive results.

Seems I just can’t quit Sword of Moonlight! Earlier in September I made up my mind to work on the MHM files that are counterpart to the MSM files from last month. No one really knows what these acronyms mean. I hazard to guess Map Hull Model, and who knows for the S in MSM. Sculpture? Possibly its Japanese.

I thought it’d be a small project, because there is — or ought to be — far fewer MHM to MSM files. I added value to the exteriors set by fitting it together vertically, forming terraces, that look like a strip mine. This is something users like to do with the odd set that is experimental compared to the interiors. It’s the only one that isn’t a level of From Software’s remake of King’s Field included with SOM, an enticement doubling as a demonstration.

Continued: Escape from Sword of Moonlight

As a result of my endeavoring to do good by Sword of Moonlight in the back half of 2017 two remarkable things came about:

The first came out of left field. Something I’d thought about doing for years: it applies a meager form of classical antialiasing to the shapes cutout by black parts of texture-mapped images. This counters pixelation. I ended up doing this now because of a secondary interest in “cross-platform” text rendering; that is a challenging problem. I was considering an approach that made me curious about what this would look like, and I thought I should try to do this first, since it was simpler.

There is virtually nothing on the WWW about classical antialiasing, much less examples in software. I found some resources for implementing a relatively modern approximation called MLAA. It is not really suitable for this application, but the results were a marked improvement, so I’ve made it the default technology going forward.

The next development would be a major undertaking to finally seal the cracks I opened up in 2015 when I developed the modern replacement technology for the earlier antialiasing extension. Note that these kinds of “antialiasing” are unrelated. The new development smooths precise, purely black and white edges; whereas the “antialiasing extension” produces straight geometric lines in 3D images, and does so by preventing aliasing in the first place, akin to how MSAA works or worked, but leverages time and our eyes, so that our silicon computers can be used for more interesting things.

Continued: Return to Sword of Moonlight

Lately I’ve felt I’m burning out on COLLADA-DOM and so I’ve at least temporarily turned my attention back to Sword of Moonlight. My return so far proceeds on two fronts — or three if you count the slew of issues seemingly brought about by the Windows 10 Creator Update:

Front 1 is the King’s Field II port. I’m beginning by surveying Melanat, made with SOM_MAP, accurate to the King’s Field in-game maps. This is something I’d want to do myself even if there was an easier way. I’ve done some tests and will soon add an image overlay feature to SOM_MAP.

Front 2 is to make technical changes to From Software’s artwork, so it is compatible with extensions I developed in 2015 that enable Sword of Moonlight to conjure perfectly straight lines without “anti-aliasing” perfect for the stark geometric shapes of the original PlayStation games. This was the first practical objective I had in mind for Daedalus. It still is.

I’ve web searched the landscape in vain. I’ve concluded developing a new editing software is unavoidable. It’s not the only way, but it’s the only way that doesn’t make me uncomfortable.

I’ve settled on borrowing from a modest open source project called Misfit Model 3D. In order to carry out software, programmers methodically pore over problem domains, and this is the molten core value of a baseline competent code base. By carrying this effort over into Daedalus I sidestep having to do that myself (up to a point) and am liberated to be more creative and less necessitous. While I feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel this time, I’m also feeling positive about this arrangement, even if it is just an instinct.

In July I inadvertently preoccupied myself porting COLLADA-DOM (2.5) to POSIX environments: Cygwin; and then Linux on Windows 10. I used CMake to do this. I’d never used CMake. It doesn’t have a precompiled-header framework. COLLADA-DOM requires one. So I developed one.

Today I invented a perfect anti-aliasing technique that I hadn’t envisioned. I don’t know that it’s ever been used or independently invented before. Often times I feel like my life is movie.

The technique, like the others I’ve pioneered for Sword of Moonlight during the recent months is unorthodox. It was born out of getting just right up to the finish line and wanting like mad to make it across. It’s completely “free”. Both in the sense that it doesn’t impact performance at all, literally, and is ready for all GPU based integrated graphics or whatever. And in the sense that I am certainly not interested in holding it to my chest. To the contrary I wonder how to get it out to the masses?

I’m shifting my focus with Sword of Moonlight to being all about this technique. The Moratheia project looks like a movie. Maybe I’m lovesick, but it looks like Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. I’m not sure why, something about the author’s artwork to be certain, but it’s never looked fully real before like it does now. I caught that film recently on Netflix so it’s fresh in my mind.

There is really very little to this. Except it imposes some restrictions, and the map editor tool chain may require special attention. For the map geometry cracks are everywhere, it feels like a PlayStation game, like classic King’s Field, but that’s no excuse. To use this technique the vertices must be manipulated in “homogeneous space” so there has to be common vertices everywhere; I haven’t seen any non-map tile elements that don’t adhere to this.

There are also some trouble with decal like polygons. I will probably see about making everything that isn’t map geometry decal like, but I don’t know if that is universally supported by hardware, and I don’t know how to implement it in a shader. This has to do with manipulating the vertices again. It doesn’t change the depth at the vertex, but it does inside the polygon.

There is a lot to attend to. This movie like quality is so impressive, it feels like it could be a clean break from the history of video games into something fresh and exciting (sometimes my life doesn’t feel like a movie. Sometimes it feels like one of those games, where you are all alone, the center of the universe, but no one else your equal nor peer. That much is a damn shame.)

I’m not sure where to begin. There’s a new mega-release up. With lots of surprises in store! It finalizes the jumping model, and adds a way to lower the point-of-view 1/3rd, letting you pass beneath things at about 22% below head level. It might not sound like much (these figures are adjustable) but even for the default height — that’s a bit on the short side — this comes out to about a full screen at nose length; which will seem like a lot.

The new feature complements jumping, since jumping now requires the release of the ground-based movement inputs. If you do not jump but instead move away, then you are able to squat/hunker down in this way. If running this is automatically done so that you do not have to stop to do so. If pressed up against a passageway or obstruction, beginning to run will pass beneath it at walking speed, at which point you can stop running if you only wish to enter the space. (If you do not jump while running you simply return to a walking gait. This should go without saying.)

There is the beginning of a way to run at full speed. There is no penalty for doing so at this time. It is not possible to run at full speed when there is not room to stand fully erect. Doing so requires that you hold down all three buttons. This release was supposed to add the ability to look behind while running, by holding down either button, so that when they cancel each other out you run at full speed instead. Run for your life as it were. However because a bigger priority was finalizing the jumping model, all efforts got directed at its complement in order to fill the hole opened up in the control scheme…

Continued: A light at the end of the tunnel…