Lightmapping Leaves The Building

On the advice of a member of the internal team, I decided to move the lightmapper to a separate external application in order to allow larger levels to be lightmapped and avoid any system memory shortfall or fragmentation for long game making sessions.

The result is a much more stable experience all round, and I am just going through the motions of testing to make sure nothing has broken. Also plan to have a new internal build for the testers this evening so I can double check the new way of lightmapping a scene works for all.

Also started to get some art from the new textured civilian character which is looking pretty sharp, and I hope to get an export soon to test the animations (which are fused with the ability to use ALL the weapon styles).  I have also identified some other system memory pockets that might allow some more savings, and getting the ESCAPE level to use less than 800MB of system memory would be a great place to be.

Hopefully I can bring better screenshots on Wednesday as it should be more a day of testing large levels than the grunt of adding and refining code.  My emphasis will be on stability, not losing my performance gains, having pre-bake and real time shadows for all scenarios and ensuring static and dynamic lights work across the board also. I think these are the principal priorities for V1.009 (amongst the other few hundred features that have been added since V1.008) :)