Sighting: First real "milestone" within range!

[Cervator]

So after thinking about progress lately I've realized we're near the end of what you could call a milestone, without even realizing we were working on one!

I've renamed the existing DevMilestones page to ReleasePlan and put up a new page with actual milestone info:

http://wiki.movingblocks.net/Blockmania/DevMilestones

Over time with more actual milestones we might just use that as an index and put each milestone on its own page.

I think we're close to where we could finish up what I put down as Milestone 1 - Stratification. With just a little more polish (or heavy industrial grinding, really, these are still pretty rough systems!) I think we could be done with everything on that list and on the way to have some specific goals for a second milestone.

I put the few remaining todos on that page - let me know what you think. I'm going to look at the portal/mob/blueprint piece and try to see if I can get slimes to spawn both at a nice distance and also conditionally based on flagging a semi-persistent blueprint selection as a workshop. Might even try colorizing slimes (maybe gelatinous cube would be a better and more fun name/concept?) to pair colored "workshops" to colored mobs. I'll also look to write up some more public game info in the wiki (commands and shortcut keys in particular)

I love the new trees but think the current incarnation might be an entirely new forest biome, a different kind of forest. At first the switch from dense small-tree forest to sparse huge tree forest made me think of Baobabs - not that they don't look the exact opposite of our trees (we have thin trunks and bushy tops, baobabs have thick trunks and thin tops), but a field of the most classic Baobabs exhibit the sparse placement of huge trees

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_grandidieri

Still haven't had a chance to check out the new Skysphere, but it sounds like it will be about ready for the milestone (let me know if my theory is off)

Anyway, a few more tweaks and I think an update of the Master branch plus building the applet with the latest features would be in order. Then we really have something to show off to attract new contributors for milestone 2

 

[begla]

All points sound good to me, but I've got some other important issues on my list before I happily agree to tag our baby.

1. I'll add some more performance tweaks in the next couple of days. I've already pushed a rather drastic one today, which should have increased the performance by almost 100%. Given our new trees the center areas are filled with tree trunk blocks (the old one consisted mainly of leafs). Given this new structure, leafs can be tessellated without decreasing the visual quality of the trees. And this immensely decreases the amount of faces needed to be drawn and even very, very large trees can be rendered without further ado.

2. Currently at player positions with rather large coordinate values the precision of the Z-Buffer starts to become a real problem which results in flickering polygons and bumpy player movement (already start at coordinates from 20-30k on). I finally started working on this issue in a separate branch. The solution is quite simple but a bit tricky to integrate transparently into the architecture. Simply put the camera will always stay at (0,0,0) but the world is inversely translated by the actual player position. This works quite well already in my branch, and even areas at coordinate points > 1,000,000 are no longer a problem. The finally step is to replace the entity position data structure with something supporting double values, since precision issues regarding the player physics are becoming the next issue.

 

[Cervator]

That's cool, I mainly have milestone points related to what I've been involved in, so it makes sense that there are some more centric to you (and maybe Anton) to add

And performance is important! I saw "drastic" in the check-in and thought "yay"

Not like we're hitting Alpha or anything. Just an arbitrary milestone so we can say progress has been made (feel free to add other relevant items), update the front-end stuff, and celebrate with humorous gelatinous cube jokes

 

[begla]

The blueprints are now highlighted using a transparent colored cube btw. Forgot to mention this earlier. I'll have to play a bit around with all the possible grammars and maybe extend the L-System generator even more to support different thickness between tree trunks and tree branches. I'll focus on cleaning up the architecture/code and further optimizing the game first.