Today, I actually got very little work done;  was doing the rounds and looking at various new MMORPGs.  Took a peek at Champions Online and the new free-to-play DnD Online, neither of which really thrilled me.  Each had some interesting minor variations on the standard MMORPG formula, but neither seemed to do anything that was genre-redefining.

The one thing that I did get implemented code-wise today was implementing fog properly inside the core VectorStorm engine.  That is, game code can now specify what type of fog to use, what colour it should be, and how thick it should be;  previously, it was hard-coded inside VectorStorm that everything which was marked as being affected by lights would also be affected by a greyish fog.  This change has made it so I can now have a thin black fog while the MMORPG is offline, and fade that black fog into the thicker, greyer fog as the game servers are brought online and the colourful sky is moved into place.  The grey fog always looked really weird against that flat black offline sky, I felt.  It’s much better now.

This fog support will be migrated back into the public “VectorStorm” source code repository not too far in the future, at the same time as the rest of the big MMORPG Tycoon 2-driven engine changes get merged back into the public trunk.