The first day of a new milestone

It’s always fun, starting work on a new milestone. It feels like you’re making huge, absurdly quick progress. As in this case; after one day of work on MS5, my task tracker tells me that I’m 58% done. Now, granted, MS5 is by far the shortest milestone I’ve set for myself. I’m aiming to complete…

More forests

I’ve spent much of the day today working on world terrain generation, with an emphasis on tree placement during game startup. The big thing I’ve been struggling with has been a strange bug which resulted in trees being placed in strange patterns; often in north-south or in diagonal stripes across a forest, instead of uniformly…

A story about memory

Here’s an old story.  It takes place in the distant past, right about lunchtime yesterday. I was working on getting MMORPG Tycoon 2’s PCs to draw using instancing.  I had assumed that this would be an easy task (I’d already converted buildings, monsters, and a few other things, after all), but it turned out to…

RenderTech 5 Build

This is a slightly experimental build.  In appearance, it’s almost identical to the Milestone 4 build from earlier this week, but under the hood it’s almost completely different. Here’s a list of differences: Now requires an OpenGL 3.3 core profile. All buildings, trees, monsters, and players are drawn using instancing. Which means that it should…

Them all

A little earlier than expected, but here’s that screenshot that I promised last night. This was a freshly generated world, complete with forests.  From this vantage point, we could see about 2,000 trees.  That seemed a little low to me, so I activated one of the regions over on the right edge of the map,…