Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Phew!

Many Roads

What a trio of days it has been!  Who would have thought picking up a car and having a meeting would take three days.  It's also true enough that 800 miles of road takes it's toll on the mind and body, and when I sat down at my keyboard two hours ago it suddenly hit me that I was exhausted.

I had planned to blog Wednesday and Thursday night, but 3G is still very expensive in the UK and I did not think a few hastily constructed sentences with little to do with Reloaded would be welcome or of any value. Instead I ate and slept.

On the way back up the spine of the UK, there where no less than 3 major accidents on my intended route, and a minor collision that happened right alongside me when a big red van hit a little black car with an explosion of glass.  Amazing to witness, but powerless to help as me, the victim, the perpetrator and hundreds of my closest fellow drivers where all parked on what I affectionately called the M6 car park.

Reloaded Developments

But enough of such things, you read this for juicy reloaded news and the latest is that we've further refined our business strategy to focus even more intensely on the support grid that will hold the Reloaded product to the highest standard.  No legacy graphics will be used, only top quality artwork. Every screen shots that comes from the official product and media packs will be top draw from every angle, a simple virtue of being rendered with high resolution textures, high quality light mapping and nifty shader effects. Even a simple specular tint adds so much, and specular is the least of the features we plan to squeeze into our universal shader system.

We also discussed a few more ideas, that for the sake of discretion and prudence, I will not reveal today, but you can mark this day in your calender to look back on and say, that was the day Lee didn't tell us about it :)

Signing Off

Right now I have played catch-up on all the urgent emails, and delegated the rest. My blog is back up to date, and my office once again resembles one.  I am absolutely famished and Time Team starts in 20 minutes so I'm going to finish off a few more paper rustling tasks and call it an early night.

As the last few days have eaten up valuable coding time, apart from putting some grass feed down in the garden, I will be resuming my work on the LOD system of the Instance Stamp technique which I am almost certain it will work, and then get the light mapping working on this new geometry (no small task). Getting the whole shooting match back into the editor will be the icing on the cake, but I am not falling for the illusion that I can achieve all that in a fragmentary weekend after the longest stint of driving I've done in a long time. Reality may involve a lot more sleep and a lot less code!