Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Intersections

My roads (mostly) now form automatic intersections when I place them. This makes it nice and easy to do city-block style grids.

I just need some traffic lights and I’m set :)

Latest Image

Just because I could, the Universe client now takes a screenshot when it exits, and pushes it to my server. It’s then displayed on the right, with a bigger copy below:

Automatically updated screenshot of the last Universe client run.

This picture should change pretty often when I’m doing active development, but it might look kinda strange if I’m squashing bugs :)

Buildings and roads

I implemented some initial support for procedural cities tonight. At the moment this consists of one static ‘building’ made out of some primitives, and a road system (which is what I spent most of my time playing with). While this doesn’t look particularly interesting at the moment, I now have most of the groundwork laid to do generate more complex buildings :)

One small step…

I now have some initial support for multiple planets, and different kinds of planets. So, I made a ‘moon’. It looks kinda neat, even in it’s current semi-broken state.

It looks pretty nasty from height, though. Because there’s basically only one texture and no distance fog, you can see the squares of the quadtree quite clearly. But I’ll leave that for another night.

Terrain engine fixes

Tonight I spent some time implementing a bunch of overdue optimizations and fixes to the terrain engine. Basically all the boring stuff I’d been putting off because it was going to be painful without much payoff :)

It was totally worth it, however. FPS is way up, CPU usage is down, and the annoying popping artifacts are, if not gone, at least reduced. A bunch of things still need working on, but it’s a nice step forward.

None of these changes make good screenshots, but I’d hate to lose my streak of screenshot posts. So, enjoy this shot of the improved system looking pretty much the same as it did before.