I released MMORPG Tycoon 2’s Milestone 7 build on December 7th;\u00a0 that’s just under six weeks ago.\u00a0 In that time, I’ve made 200 commits to the codebase;\u00a0 that’s an average of about 5 commits per day.\u00a0 That’s only counting changes made to the game itself;\u00a0 not ones made to the publicly available VectorStorm game engine (66 changes made to the VectorStorm engine during that time period), and there have been some reasonably large game engine changes.<\/p>\n
For example, during this period the VectorStorm game engine has switched from generating random numbers using the Mersenne Twister<\/a>, to using a simple xorshift<\/a> random number generator (specifically, xorshift1024* ).\u00a0 Additionally, it adds support for multiple random number sources in a single program.\u00a0 This now makes it possible to safely (and repeatably!) generate sequences of pseudo-random numbers from multiple threads simultaneously (by giving each thread a separate random number source).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also in this period, VectorStorm’s has begun to use the shockingly badly named PhysicsFS<\/a> library for (wait for it)… loading and saving files.\u00a0 What else would you expect a library named “Physics” to do?\u00a0\u00a0 Anyhow, this gives us a bunch of benefits, including unifying code for loading and saving files across different operating systems, for finding appropriate file directories for saving user files, and for allowing end-users to modify game files (e.g..: to support modding by users)<\/p>\n VectorStorm has added support for specifying separate colors per instance, when drawing instanced models.\u00a0 In MMORPG Tycoon 2, this functionality is being used for much quicker drawing of trees, clouds, and water ripples.<\/p>\n