Testing Testing Testing

Preparing V1.008 build, and today we've done more testing than coding, and that's saying something. More testing Friday too, looking for show stoppers and solid reproducibles.  A short blog today as I have an evening shift to get through, but I wanted to share a picture as promised.

One of my pet peeves to be tackled when I start the V1.009 work is the way terrains are textured. Right now a single channel controls which of the five textures should be painted to the ground. Unfortunately this means there can be zero overlap of arbitrary paint types and you get a sequential blend through the texture range. I will be thinking about how I can provide a good blending system for terrain textures without incurring more performance hit or requiring more resources. Eventually the goal is that you could blend the dark grey coal texture directly into the light pave texture without stomping through the immediate moss, mid and grass textures.  Using several channels of a texture slot would do it, but I don't have too many of them to spare, and I am using all 16 texture slots for terrain!! I could plum for 32 slots but I think some cards would fail at that, slow down the render even more and no-one will thank me for it.  There is a way (several I guess) I just need to think one up!  No blog Friday evening as I am leaving the country and passing through another for the weekend, but will resume and return on Monday to help answer any V1.008 release questions!