dim3 Forum

Why do you always release these new versions like... 30 minutes before I have to leave for school? :P
I'll test when I get back. It sure sounds good so far...

Engine performance is nicely improved, but there's a lot that still needs to be done.

Editor is nice and snappy now. It doesn't hang when saving the maps.

I encountered an engine bug when trying to go to the in-game menu (by pressing Esc).

I tried to post the crash report but it says the post is too long :o

A bug in editor: if you create a flat mesh (such as a 10x10 grid), it's not really flat. It's actually a big cube squeezed until it's flat, which means you get both the top and bottom polygons at the same place. This is not noticeable until you try to texture or delete a polygon. This is not a serious bug but very aggravating.

(2008.09.24 04:54 AM)Ledorax Wrote: [ -> ]A bug in editor: if you create a flat mesh (such as a 10x10 grid), it's not really flat. It's actually a big cube squeezed until it's flat, which means you get both the top and bottom polygons at the same place. This is not noticeable until you try to texture or delete a polygon. This is not a serious bug but very aggravating.

Oh yeah, it's meant to be a cube, but I'll make a special check if you drop any of the coordinates to 0 to remove those sides.

[>] Brian

---

(2008.09.24 02:27 AM)Kieranator Wrote: [ -> ]Engine performance is nicely improved, but there's a lot that still needs to be done.

Editor is nice and snappy now. It doesn't hang when saving the maps.

I encountered an engine bug when trying to go to the in-game menu (by pressing Esc).

I tried to post the crash report but it says the post is too long :o

Please email this to me -- this is actually a bug I've been looking for (it seems to happen on the windows build 1 out of 100 times and it's frustrating to track.)

ggadwa ....... put the at here ..... charter.net

[>] Brian

---

(2008.09.24 02:27 AM)Kieranator Wrote: [ -> ]Editor is nice and snappy now. It doesn't hang when saving the maps.

Note that it never hung, it just takes forever to generate a proper visibility map, and now your old maps are defaults to "none" for visibility, which means they are slower then they should be (change it to rough when you are developing.)

[>] Brian

---

Alex --

Now that I have OBJ import breaking up by material, I was wondering how much control you have over the "names" of the material.

Right now, when I import, all the meshes are set to the currently selected texture. If I could match up material names in the OBJ with material names in dim3 (it would be your responsibility to keep them in synch, and they wouldn't be the file name but the actual material name) -- I could probably make the importing one step easier.

Does this sound like a good idea?

I'd probably also make a change to auto-set the material name when you load up a texture to the name of the texture.

[>] Brian

When importing wings, multiple meshes can be combined into one group and separated again. Make sure to account for those. I am thinking that if combined like that, it shouldn't be broken up by the importer.

(2008.09.24 10:24 AM)teh1ghool Wrote: [ -> ]When importing wings, multiple meshes can be combined into one group and separated again. Make sure to account for those. I am thinking that if combined like that, it shouldn't be broken up by the importer.

OK, but I don't think the OBJ (I'll check again tonight) contains that information. It's just a list of vertexes, uv coords, and faces wrapped in materials. There doesn't seem to be any other kind of grouping (though I could make a switch to combine like named materials.)

I could be mistaken, I'll take a look, but I don't want to promise this if it's not possible

[Edit] teh1ghool, if you have a second, can you do this group/un-group, then export to OBJ and re-import the OBJ and see if the information you want is still there? That would tell me what I need to know.

[>] Brian

Email sent, Brian.

Unfortunately, I just so happen to be at school now. If you haven't done it in a few hours I will do it.

More updates on progress. Working mostly on engine now and cleaning up some things before diving into the big stuff.

A couple minor things like a new "smeared" view when you pause the game to go into a GUI element (like the menu.) Before hand it kept drawing the view and this would burn cycles for no reason and make the GUI less responsive. It also caused some weird bugs depending on when you paused it.

Also, I know there's going to be a lot of discussion over this, but I'm taking a shot at having Engine generate the text on the fly (no more bitmaps.) There are pros and cons and I know some of you like the bitmaps, but for me it adds:

1) The ability to have styles (with lots of people doing more RPG'ish type stuff that's useful)
2) Future support for multiple languages
3) Future support for multiple fonts
4) Much better positioning (proportional spacing wasn't based on the real font as I had no idea what you guys were doing in the bitmap)

It looks very nice and it'll have a css-like system of "fallbacks" for missing fonts. Again, I'm just seeing how well this works right now, so keep the complaints to a dull roar

I'll try to get in the requested "data with messages" API and a couple other requests.

[>] Brian

(2008.09.26 12:12 AM)ggadwa Wrote: [ -> ]More updates on progress. Working mostly on engine now and cleaning up some things before diving into the big stuff.

A couple minor things like a new "smeared" view when you pause the game to go into a GUI element (like the menu.) Before hand it kept drawing the view and this would burn cycles for no reason and make the GUI less responsive. It also caused some weird bugs depending on when you paused it.

Also, I know there's going to be a lot of discussion over this, but I'm taking a shot at having Engine generate the text on the fly (no more bitmaps.) There are pros and cons and I know some of you like the bitmaps, but for me it adds:

1) The ability to have styles (with lots of people doing more RPG'ish type stuff that's useful)
2) Future support for multiple languages
3) Future support for multiple fonts
4) Much better positioning (proportional spacing wasn't based on the real font as I had no idea what you guys were doing in the bitmap)

It looks very nice and it'll have a css-like system of "fallbacks" for missing fonts. Again, I'm just seeing how well this works right now, so keep the complaints to a dull roar

I'll try to get in the requested "data with messages" API and a couple other requests.

[>] Brian

YES! I have no complaints about anything in this post.

You think we'll be look at another update by Sunday?