good information

Nice to see some activity here that isn't spam.

...for folks who follow my @simsilica twitter... lots of stuff going on recently.

Man, that was all the way back in march. It feels like just a couple months ago that i dropped that question despite this being one of the longest years of my life, lol. Time's weird.

I hope to do that this weekend.

Yes thank you

There have been some game related posts on twitter.  https://twitter.com/Simsilica

...but nothing concrete enough to post here yet.  Something soon, I hope.

Not sure what the image was supposed to be because apparently we don't have permission to see it (at least when I clicked on it).

Here is the blog post that goes with that video, I think: http://mythruna.com/forum/index.php?topic=2505.msg21096#new

I spent the winter holidays playing with water strategies.  While I didn't finalize anything yet, the experiments were encouraging.  I'm experimenting with doing water in a completely different way than any other block engine that I've seen... essentially by not treating it as blocks anymore.  Parts of my approach still feel wrong and counterintuitive but the math and experiments always seem to work out.  So it could just be that we are all too used to blocks of water.  The real test will be optimizing it for "whole oceans".

...so in the near term, I'm focusing on revisiting terrain generation to build some more varied worlds than Mythruna has traditionally had.  But we're getting closer to "new engine"... so close I can almost taste it.

any new news about this game?

My day job is a telecommuting job... so no special time off for me.

The kids are home from school, though... until mid-April... which means I don't have to get up at 5:30 AM every day.  So that's a bonus.

I had planned to take the week of spring break off from work, do some stuff with the kids, and then get some hardcore game-coding work done.  It remains to be seen if I will still take that time or not now.  (At work, it was a bad week to take it because of scheduling and now with the kids home for a month anyway... and our options for 'stuff to do' are kind of limited anyway.)

I have been pushing some things along a little every weekend.  Lately trying to finalize plans for what the 'far terrain' system will look like and if it's even feasible.  I know I shoe-horned something into the old engine that looked ok but some parts were never done and might have been impossible.  I'm trying to figure all of those things out now.

https://imgur.com/a/Mahv8v7  (without context, these images may not mean much but I'm trying to be more "doing" and less "talking" these days.)

This is a pretty big issue because with 192 clip and slow paging, flying with any sort of fun speed was really stupid.  I'm also hoping to raise the build ceiling a bit (those pics go up to 512 meters) but it remains to be seen if I can actually make that work in the block engine or not.  Lighting is the most problematic area for tall build ceilings.  Currently hoping that treating the world as 256 meter tall layers may have some benefits.

After I have this large scale terrain fully prototyped, with proper write-back, etc... I need to reimplement/port non-cube block shapes from old code and start building the real engine again.

Never seem to have enough time to do things quickly on the calendar, though.

So Paul, do you anticipate a chance at getting more work in due to the whole coronavirus thing? Or are you working from home?

Oh, and best wishes to your wife. Epidemics and pandemics are dark times for people that are immunocompromised, and the US government has been floundering with it to boot. Knowing you, though, she's in good hands.

Not sure what the image was supposed to be because apparently we don't have permission to see it (at least when I clicked on it).

Here is the blog post that goes with that video, I think: http://mythruna.com/forum/index.php?topic=2505.msg21096#new

I spent the winter holidays playing with water strategies.  While I didn't finalize anything yet, the experiments were encouraging.  I'm experimenting with doing water in a completely different way than any other block engine that I've seen... essentially by not treating it as blocks anymore.  Parts of my approach still feel wrong and counterintuitive but the math and experiments always seem to work out.  So it could just be that we are all too used to blocks of water.  The real test will be optimizing it for "whole oceans".

...so in the near term, I'm focusing on revisiting terrain generation to build some more varied worlds than Mythruna has traditionally had.  But we're getting closer to "new engine"... so close I can almost taste it.