Wednesday Sun

Sunburn

I went out this afternoon for celebration meal I promised myself for winning some of the categories in the recent Intel competition, and went and got myself sunburned.  I think today was hotter than the last two days put together and I soaked it all in. No sun cream, just shandy to protect me. Silly silly silly, you think I would know better but frankly, I don't go into town very often and three hours is two hours too long in the baking heat.

Progress

Due to my condition once I got back indoors, I was feeling none too bright (but glowing) so did not get much in the way of Reloaded code. I had a full book today so it looks like Thursday going to be double busy :)  I can show off a nice piece of art from Mark which might give you some clues as to the standard we are aiming for with our texture and shader treatment of the new scene visuals.

Impressively, this is just a basic polygon cube with some extremely nice depth bump mapping applied to create the rich surface detail.  This is the theme we will be playing with for a while, and hope to get that level of detail everywhere you look. 

It's hard to picture at the moment, but like any building project we have to start with a brick and work upwards!  With the character animations being finished off (for a first draft at least) we are starting to think about segment meshes, textures, shaders and LOD. This will give us some nice scenes from which to demonstrate future prototypes that feature the engine.  I can't wait to see what we come up with :)

Even though segment adding and deletion are done, I still want to carry on with the map editor and get textures working, legacy segments working again (as well as the new LOD based ones), and tweak back other failing bits like the art draw tools are reversed as I switched the level layout from negative Z to positive Z. I did this in part as exporting levels in the future will make much more sense, but mainly it was because the Instance Stamp system only deals with positive coordinates. It also means when I work on coordinate code I no longer have to mentally reverse the Z axis all the time which will save my sanity some more.

Signing Off

I am assuming lots of fluids and an early night will solve the headache, burning and sickness from my mild bout of sub-stroke.  The meal was nice so that's something good to take from today.  I also managed to clear most of my inbox of emails and all the paperwork on my desk so should be a fine coding day 'indoors' on Thursday.