Wednesday Workalot

List Hopping

A rather ordinary day in the life of a developer. A few emails, a few cups of tea and LOTS and LOTS of coding. I have a mission to complete a small mountain of issues for Friday so have been getting my head down and cracking on with everything. See the web site for news on what I am up to, but they pretty much range through the whole engine tackling little bits.

A Big Bit

I did add a rather nice new drop down gadget to the slider panel system so you can easily select the sky, terrain and vegetation type you want. It works quite nicely, and at some point our 2D artists will be free to improve the cosmetics of the whole panel system.  The drop down system is pretty neat in that is just scans the contents of the sky, terrain and veg bank folders at the start, then allows you to select which one you want. It's pretty neat actually and I think it will be the main feature you will like in Friday's version.

Other Bits

I also dug out the Game Creator Store code and got it working with our VS 2010 redistributables after much ado. It's a back-burner integration but it will probably come in sooner rather than later, and I have also improved the legacy support for static entities so old models from classic will now be infused with the new in-game entity shader, and provided with a default normal and specular map if none are present for the entity.  I have also commissioned a guide to be written next week which will cover all the basics of how to prepare an entity for Reloaded, which will be an ideal guide on how to get your favorite classic models into the new software.

Signing Off

Rick asked me to improve the random terrain generation so the landscape was more 'interesting', but not 'Lee Crazy Interesting', so here is what it produces now when you start the software and when you select a New Level:

Hopefully it's not too crazy for your consumption.  The system will raise some ground if the random generator places you in the center of a lake, as I assume you always want to start your landscape creations from dry land :)

NOTE: If anyone wants to send an old legacy static entity to me, one that you wanted in Reloaded but it failed to look right or collide properly when you imported it, email it to me in a zip to lee@thegamecreators.com. Thanks!