Greets!
This is my "The Obligatory Introduce Yourself Thread." I will post a link to it once up, but I do not feel this is appropriate to drop in the middle of the TOIYT.
First off, this is my first post. I've seen this website/forum around for a long time. I don't know where the nexus of DIY 3-D is, or if there is such a thing, but whatever the case may be, I've not heard reports. I may just be very bad at surfing the WWW, but what I'm trying to say is, if there is a monolithic/obvious DIY 3-D community/culture that meets somewhere, or, more importantly, enables great works, I don't know what that is. So please forgive me if I am late to the party!
I did some interesting things before 2010, but I just want to stay in 2010-now. I want to share with people the fruit of my work during this period. I've always worked with the hope of slowly having like-minded people come into my orbit; but it's never been thus. If anything I've routinely encountered difficult people that led me to withdraw bit by bit. (Not emotionally, or anything. I just tend not to get involved for purely practical reasons.)
In 2010 I made the decision to moor myself to a concept called "Sword of Moonlight." It's a complex affair, but the meat of it is a 3-D RPG Maker that was made by From Software, published around the eve of the century in Japan. It's very misunderstood, and the people who are naturally interested in it, tend to be antagonistic to my work involving it. But their numbers are few.
This is not a quirk of my personality. I actually believe this software will come to dominate the 21st century. It was a calculated move on my part. I felt it's the most interesting historical anomaly, and so staked my career on it.
Before I say more. I want to stress that I am a no-nonsense person. My work is completely public domain, cradle to grave. I don't have time in my schedule to socialize, so I hardly have time for anything like legal or business paperwork/risk. I am pure that way. Here (
https://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight) is the basic tract, and I only share this because I want others to consider this a resource. It's ripe for taking.
I've put off sharing this work in forums like this one, because I wanted to wait until it felt like the right time.
This year, I've not been able to work on Sword of Moonlight directly. It's felt very long, and I've had few correspondences of late. It's looking as if the original well of interest from odd places has almost completely dried up. An artist is supposed to be publishing an interesting piece, soon, like yesterday, but I've not heard anything from them for weeks. They are really the last speck of interest, outside of my own. This is why I feel like it's a good time to open the doors so-to-speak. Or let in fresh air.
To be be blunt, Sword of Moonlight is the all-around best 3-D platform we have, I believe. But you wouldn't know it. It's very much flying below the radar. My work is very focused on fundamentals. I think the technology is very raw, primitive, and so works should communicate this, and not deviate from it. Last year was very exciting. I inadvertently solved a very interesting problem in 3-D graphics that no one else seems to know/care exists. The subtitle of Sword of Moonlight is "King's Field Making Tool." King's Field is a PlayStation trilogy, that has outwardly simplistic visuals. I don't believe they are simplistic, but they are admittedly bare. There is a strong focus on geometry, so I am naturally very concerned about jagged edges, caused by "aliasing," and in my work, I refused to accept image-based "anti-aliasing" solutions, because I believe 3-D art should be tailored to the common desktop/nettop with a GPU; and not high-end workstations, and that anyway, the computational cycles AA uses are better used elsewhere, and that the solutions do not scale anyway, and that they're not generally compatible with techniques that generate good images. (These techniques make use of the human eye. It's a much more powerful computer than any silicon.)
To me things like jagged edges are what holds the medium back. When it comes to non-visual things, there are details like how the digital body carries the player through spaces. These questions are not really afforded thought, because this medium doesn't really appeal to great thinkers. It's never attempted to.
The funny thing is, this discovery could've happened in the 90s. And for 15 years we could have been playing video games without jagged edges. It doesn't surprise me these quirks of history exist, because no one's so far expressed interest in this video technology/technique/revolution! (/alternate history we've been subjected to for more than a decade.)
This is not Sword of Moonlight (SOM) but SOM is the vessel I use to express myself, and I approach it with the same kind of attention. This "post-AA" technique is described in detail in the comments in the link above.
Part of the technique, is the vertices of triangles require special care--as with tessellation--so cracks do not form. That meant someone had to doctor SOM's stock art files. Someone with experience at this pledged to, but their work was not forthcoming, so I resolved to do it myself ... but I found I could not; or could not justify the excursion given the inadequate resources we had. From Software provided some tools for using X art files as an exchange format. The years have not been kind to X. I don't know why. I think it's a perfectly good format. But in 2016 it's pretty much dead. No software supports it in any capacity.
I cannot remember what came first, but anyway, I decided that COLLADA was the ticket, and I'd just resolve to substitute the role of X with COLLADA's file format. I thought COLLADA is 10 years old, it must be mature by now. But alas, no. I soon learned COLLADA was functionally still-born/dead also. But much like SOM, I become enamored with the concept more than the reality, and plus there is that, there are no contenders to COLLADA's mission statement, not even after 10 years, nor any pretenders in sight in fact. So I resolved again to make COLLADA a real thing, this year: 2016. All DIY developers have probably given COLLADA a look before. I want to tell all that it's finally happening, for real this time.
I also want the lot of you who use Blender, to pressure the Blender foundation to integrate COLLADA after I've completed work on it. There will be no excuse not to. I need there to be software like Blender that can claim full COLLADA compliance myself, to do my work.
So, in conclusion, I want people to know these 3 things.
1) There is a 3-D ARPG-like platform, that aims to be cyberspace incarnate. Think Minecraft-meets-Shadow of the Colossus. It's not a "game engine." It's a high-level development environment. Think RPG Maker. I think. And I aim to make it a media empire of sort, or a kind of culture/community to gather artists to develop a digital art-resources-commons, facilitated by new public software horizons.
2) There is a video-revolution. We are post-AA believe it or not (antialiasing is a bygone technology don't you know) and we can make 3-D art that works on every computer in the store. They all have GPUs. We should be enjoying an age where everyone can access 3-D artworks. Especially on desktop/nettop systems.
3) COLLADA is finally going to be a thing. For real this time. I promise. A multi-representational, lossless, archival, deeply-linked, transformative, art-exchange format. A digital art backbone, like the WWW is to information exchange. (EDITED: My one backer on Patreon is one of the co-fathers of the COLLADA specification: Mark Barnes. Money doesn't move me, but by all means do join us--after cautious consideration. The Patreon is mostly to raise awareness. I am mostly ambivalent about finances--although I wish I could say the same for my immediate family!)
PS: I am not grandstanding. Please don't try to take me down a peg. I'm just trying to convey this information. I haven't described SOM in depth, because I hope instead it will be downloaded and experienced first hand. I hope From Software ARPG Maker retooled for the 21st century is enough to whet peoples' appetites.PPS: If you try to setup SOM, I could write a few more paragraphs of what's in store. But basically you want these (http://svn.swordofmoonlight.net/Sword-of-Moonlight/) files--via Subversion. You probably have D3DX/9 installed. To setup, run Setup.bat, and then Start.bat. Try to navigate the language pack installer, to setup an English TOOL/DATA package. Use the packages called "Neutral." (Read their descriptions to see why.) Update the environment components to be safe. There will be a few. They're not the same every time. It's not stuck on a loop. Read the text to see what's what. The stock artwork is not without a soul, but it is thoroughly pockmarked, and understandably a bit underwhelming. (There is a WebGL model viewer on the website if anyone wants to browse the models. There are like a thousand. I can provide instructions.) Artists can/do produce original artwork that make much more impressive experiences, by the standards of today. I hope that new game I spoke of will be out soon as promised. It has very becoming art, which can go a long way to making a good first impression. Just for the record, there are doctored versions of the stock artwork floating around the WWW. I intend to make a campaign to do a proper job of them WRT the files on this website, but mainly just to complete the package in due course. MAJOR DIGRESSION WARNING: On my timeline I am actually more interested in restoring/memorializing the second act of the PlayStation trilogy, by porting it to SOM. I think this will be an event, because it's the prototypical VR experience. I think its effect is timeless. After, game-wise, I want to develop a flagship open-design* series out of King's Field, by making it into a 9 episode series that is something like Ico/SOTC, but more substantial. My aim is to do something like Star Wars level accessible/iconic for video games, to push the medium past the cartoon mascot era, and produce something that is something like a testament to the human race: our video game. Little known King's Field has this in it I think. It's the Legend of Zelda of 3-D that no one's ever heard of. I am also interested in developing From Software's Master of Arena (Armored Core) in the same vein, because I think building fighting robots is the apotheosis of capital V/G, Video Games, and because funnily enough, the work on COLLADA actually intersects with open-robotics. (EDITED: and I'm a fan.)It may also take some setup to get analog controls working correctly. Once in a game world, pressing the Esc key cycles through configured analog modes. If they do not suit you, then modes can be added to the configuration file. It has a very unique control/movement scheme that must be experienced to be believed. It uses only three buttons, but you can move in any way a person can move, in ways that you will find both very surprising (unorthodox/unheard of) and simultaneously and completely natural. Movement wise, it far surpasses everything in existence pretty much. Visually as well. Although you might not think so at first.*By "open-design" think approaching a story/video-game series, as if it is open-source software, or even like a wiki. Think oral-tradition, but versioned.
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