Tuesday 17 December 2013

Monday Halved

Four Hours With The Secret Coder

A good early start to Monday preceded a marathon four hour conversation as I prepped the new coder for his first foray into the Reloaded engine. Covering everything from brand vision and project scope through to coding style and the new DBP compiler.  He is now armed with most of the tools he needs to produce something cool for Reloaded.

The Walk

I then went for a walk before dinner, which turned into a long walk and I only got back at close to 5PM, picking my car up en-route from the garage. After some refreshment I suddenly felt fatigued so had myself an early night.

Signing Off


For some reason, my previous entry for Monday was half-deleted and unpublished, so I am publishing it again now. Hopefully it will stay undeleted long enough for you to read Monday's capers.

3 comments:

  1. A walk? Lol, then coming back and having a meal, no wonder you felt sleepy! Let's hope you get cracking at those Quads today, so we can have a good Xmas .04 release! Or, if not maybe increase the draw distance a little, as the pop up drives me slightly nuts at the moment, I miss looking at a nice scene from a distance, and having say bridge sections popping up as I traverse them looks pretty odd. I'm almost tempted to look back at your older blogs and find the bit where I can enable them, but so far have resisted the temptation as I would prefer to see them working correctly!
    No slacking now you have another coder on the team! I can imagine, you went through everything, and then said "Ok, that should keep you going for a bit, now I'm going for a walk!"
    I'm only kidding of course, but still those Quads await you, like evil Tribbles waiting to breed.

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    1. Funnily, that's kind of how I imagined the situation too. Totally felt like he'd left the other programmer to do the hard work!

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  2. I am not quite sure myself yet having obviously tried a wide range of various settings if the veg system. i.e. grass is fully user controllable either or whether as it seems to be only so with a set of hard coded parameters so that one cannot full control its LOD/display ranges as opposed to the other numerous controls it has for height and so on?

    Despite my having apparently not the best or optimum video card it would be much better if grass could have more flexible user distance control as together with current range of settings it would be possible to have I recon a scattering of ground veg cover at greater ranges that way even on lower end systems. Instead I have the seeming difficulty of choice of having no grass/veg or having it pop up at ranges which are far too close to make it reasonable or visually appealing during game/level play.

    Much like the rest of the entities at present it largely does not exist and then pops up only when the player is quite close - too close to make any decent game visually - when you move away a short distance and turn around of course the grass has disapeared again. As we have a very large world/terrain where one can most often see quite a distance then its either bone bear or only displays content at very close range relative to what you are seeing in front of you e.g. almost at your feet relative to the size of the world in view. One minute you have an empty landscape and the next you have a complete forest with ground cover continuing to build and pop up as you move forward at far to close a range as its not subtle at all but completely in your face.

    Perhaps I am mistaken about the hard coding of the grass/veg and have not got the right fine tuned settings yet and or I just need a better video card if that would indeed make much difference. I don't know as I don't have it.

    What I am saying then is - by a user reducing the veg cover quantity, quality height and width and alike via current settings then the close range could be extended so the more of the landscape in front of their eyes is covered with a limited amount of veg cover and the range it now pops up at could be extended if the user could adjust that range manually if - but if hard coded they cant. Better less cover over a wider area than denser cover in a limited area if thats the choice. Or at least a user choice option.

    As said I may have got it wrong and have just not played about with the settings enough to find a decent and acceptable balance. If I could save my hard earned fine tuned settings instead of having to re-set them all hundreds of times a day every time I start a session, exit and restart the editor constantly every day as I have to while developing things, working on models and fine tweaking in level and then updating them constantly, deleting bin and dbo files and so on I may be able to get a better fix on it and that problem of not being able to save the level settings from one minute to another is like the popping in and out of entities and veg driving me and I guess others users slowly insane.

    :-)

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