So I worked today on the queuing of the planet generation, and a lot of problems came to light… First, I found out that this new video card I have throws a lot of errors that the previous one didn’t… Mostly they’re warnings, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what the […]
So I got an old video card (a ATI Radeon 5850) to replace the one that went kaput yesterday, and I’m up and running again… Today I started by fixing the stuff I broke on the Skydancer with the latest polish changes in the game… I actually forgot to take screenshots, but basically the windows […]
Think I finally squashed the last bugs caused by the multithreading system… After a lot of logging, it was fairly easy to fix, the difficulty was finding out exactly where things were going wrong… Also fixed a lot of small pending bugs (mostly waiting on things to go wrong with the multithreading), and added some […]
…I got some nasty bugs due to the multithreading… Not totally unexpected, but I thought I was in the clear… I added all the code to clear areas… To be well below the 1Gb RAM used, I store only a maximum of 5 areas in RAM, then I evict them… First I had some problems […]
And another day without a screenshot… Mostly work behind the scenes, but it’s going along nicely… Already can generate areas in the background and they work fine… It’s a lot of work, but most of it has been smooth sailing (which is a bit unexpected)… Need to deal with some crashes (to be expected) and […]
Today I started tackling one of the big optimizations: multithreaded area generation and management… Multithreaded code is always hard, since it demands a lot of care on how to build stuff, and since graphic APIs don’t like working multithreaded (at least D3D9 doesn’t), I need to work around that limitation as well… So started with […]
Today I added some more water effects, namely the “waves” when you walk in the water and the splash when you get in: It’s not very good, but I think it works… Also added an effect for when lightning hits the water, instead of just leaving a scorch mark: Then I had some bugs to […]
The days started great… Added the “grass” shader to OpenGL, and added the option to hide the UI (great for screenshots), and was adding something pretty cool: water splashes when the player jumps or falls into water. In the process, I found another silly precision bug (that of course, manifests if I switch renderers): when […]
Worked a bit more on grass today… In the process I found a silly bug with the terrain generation: The water over there should have a barrier making a basin… The reason for this was that the terrain around it was marked as “static” (because it’s rock), but it shouldn’t in this case… The result […]
Working on grass for the alien planet… Results are absolutely terrible! First I tried putting in grass in a triangular pattern, so you could look at it from any angle (for cutscenes, mainly)… The first problem shows up… The normal of one or two prongs will always be extra dark, which will cause the ugliness […]