And now for something completely different: A while ago I wrote an article about how you could now find my site with LiveJournal. I still don’t know what the great thing about LiveJournal is, but I would want to have it working. For some reason, however, the feed would not update there. Now I finally realised what the problem was: I was using some special chars which I should have encoded but didn’t in the description of exactly the article about LiveJournal.
I hated the screenshot of the last post and didn’t want to see it whenever I visited my own homepage, so I made a new one. Since my last post, I created a skybox with Terragen. I still don’t understand a lot of aspects about this program, but it was surprisingly easy to create a skybox which has no seams and looks nearly photo-realistic.
It took a lot more work than you might think, but I have a skybox and improved weather now. The skybox textures come from TuxRacer, but I’ll look for others soon. The snow flakes have been shrunk (they used to be between 1 and 2 metres, now they’re between 0.25 and 0.5 metres and look way better) and need a new texture. Distance fog is there, so everything is fine, or would be fine if the damn ground texture for my map wouldn’t suck as much as it does.
There are currently several tasks that I will do as soon as I want to, and most of them are quite difficult, requiring me to change large pieces of my code. I was too lazy to do this, so I decided to do something easier. The tracks of the vehicle now have wheels, as they should have had in the first place.
For Mac, there is no to capture videos from games. The only good app for this task is Snapz Pro X, but it’s expensive and I don’t like the name. So to show some videos of the now working movement code, I had to write my own video capture system for this game.
So now I implemented all features I wanted to have for my particle system, including the randomness, and to celebrate this I made a little snow. The fascinating thing about this is that it worked without any problems. Performance is as nice as ever, so everything is cool.
This post was supposed to be longer, but I accidentally deleted my WIP-screenshots, thinking they were older ones. But who cares, the important thing is that I have a complete, working particle system.
My current goal is to get that snow mobile working. On this way, there are several obstacles and I managed to get around one of them. My plan is to implement the tracks as conveyor belts as illustrated in the Newton Game Dynamics forum - where it didn’t work as expected, but I don’t understand any of the alternatives. To get this working, I needed to get joints working. And I got them working.
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