Blog Spike

Had a nice spike in my blog readership, probably due to the flaming comments section over the last two days :)  Again, had a great pure day working on ambient occlusion and my little system can now light map on command, skip any light map objects that have already been lit, invalidate other entities that share an light map with one that has been moved/deleted/invalidated. It can also bounce between lit and non-lit to mimic the movement from IDE editor to Test Game. All this is in the integratable prototype and once I have solved one last 'strange' crash, I will be moving it to the main engine for final integration. I will then stick it on an 'F' key and see what happens :)

Also got some great new art in today, featuring new concrete columns and some military/outpost decals which you can slap onto the side of anything you want, giving the place a little personality.

In other close of week news, the Construction Kit is marching along, now with the ability to switch between building block themes, switch texture variations so the tile based block building process looks less formal and more random and is just about ready to involve an artist to produce the high quality geometry and textures we need to make the CONKIT results look topper. As you might have guessed, the theme of the first set of 'prefabs' will be Concrete!

I had some more shots prepared, but I think I will avoid further flame and hold it back until I can show a genuine leap forward, that is, integrated into the Test Game and using the new static_basic.fx shader I am writing for the specific purpose of creating a fast and nice looking static geometry render. Until then, enjoy your weekend and thanks again for your encouragement!