Meeting Day And Material Success

Had our ritual meeting today which starts early at 8AM and ends sometime around 4PM in the pub :)  Covered many topics, mainly progress and strategy, and had a good chat about the next steps for our AGK2 and Reloaded projects. Went very well and was able to get back and have something to eat and a cat nap before waking up and writing this blog.

Had a dream about some weird contraption where about eight people connect to a large ring hovering above them, which resembled a massive quad copter but with the propeller in the middle.  We started it up, and after a while we could pull our knees back and we remained air-born. It was then up to the individuals to decide whether to go up, down or in which direction. I am not sure how it was controlled, but I was given the conch and was able to move the beast by simply leaning in the direction intended. After about a minute, and gaining a good 30 feet over some grassy field, one of the passengers started getting woozy and wanted to get off, so the craft was subsequently landed, and the person ran off to throw up.  I then awoke to the tune of the cat throwing up hairballs.  I would provide a screenshot, but it was just a dream :)

What I can show however was the antics from last night. I finally finished work at about 2AM, clocking over ten hours on a single task:

This is what I had at 9PM with the off shadow issue and something not quite right, and totally too many polygons and draw calls.

And this is what I had at 2AM. As you can see, all those meshes have been welded up and even though each building has six textures (materials) each, the system was able to identify their close proximity and common attributes and weld them together to create the whole scene in just 4 draw calls. As you can see it's also lightmapped. This is a model from the City Pack in the store, but as Rick pointed out today the upper building texture is wrong as there are two texture types used in the original model. Looks like I have a little more grind stone to spin before this multi-material thorn in my side is extracted!

On a non-Reloaded subject, I stumbled across a movie production last night called Bedrooms to Billions, which is a great film to watch if you are an aging 40 something Brit who dabbed in computers back in the day, and charts the rise and fall of the UK games industry. Yes folks, that's fall.  I've only watched half of it, then I had to sleep, but I think it has a happy ending with the news that after dropping from #1 to about #5 in the global economy of making games, a new breed of mobile adepts are emerging who may very well help our small island regain some of it's former glory, and with the recent introduction of programming lessons in our curriculum (teaching kids algorithms as young as 5), we're set to have a generation of Brits who eat, sleep and think binary ;) A powerful resource to have in the techno-magical era ahead.

Time to fix the last remaining multi-material lightmap grumble, test everything around it, make sure nothing is broken, then test the rest of the City Pack to confirm it all works well together and put a temporary lid on the issue so I can move onto the next thing. We've agreed a tentative deadline for the final V1.009 (secret) so we're now focused to get something solid out to you soon. I can say a build will 99% get out to you before the Christmas season, and that build will be a good one.