Remember a few weeks back when I talked about how pleased I was to have fixed a bug involving vertex normals when welding together the vertices of models?

Well, it turns out that I hadn’t fixed it at all;  I’d merely hidden it in a few situations.  As you can see from the screenshot on the left, the problem was still visible in other places (left corner of the graveship, top of the column, and more subtly, roof of the inn).

I believe that I’ve now well and truly solved the problem;  certainly all those problem areas are now rendering more appropriately, as seen in the screenshot on the right.  So yay.  As I mentioned before, these fixes are in the “vsMeshMaker” utility class in the VectorStorm library.  These fixes will be brought into the live trunk sometime in the next few days, once I’m satisfied that the bug is actually fixed for real this time, and hasn’t just scampered off to hide under some different rock.

In other news, I spent a good half hour trying to figure out why I haven’t been able to post thumbnails of screenshots since moving to the new server.  Turns out that WordPress really wants to have php5’s gd module installed, and I had neglected to install that on the new server. Boo to WordPress’s support sites, which don’t mention that it needs this module.

In non-news, I’m still poking away at MMORPG Tycoon 2 and making (extremely) slow but steady progress.  There hasn’t been much to show for a while, as I’ve been re-plumbing its innards to use regular VectorStorm library functionality wherever possible, instead of using custom rendering code everywhere.   VectorStorm now supports out-of-the-box features (batched rendering, etc) which I had previously implemented explicitly within custom game-side rendering logic in MMORPG Tycoon 2.  Simpler codebases lead to faster development!  But simplifying codebases takes a lot of time.  Especially when you’re doing it in your spare time.