Today I got the last major rendering feature running. I also fixed a bug that has been bothering me for weeks. I didn't expect today, or the last two weeks for that matter, to turn out like they did.

I wanted there to be some vivid color in my world. Much of the scenery is monochromatic, so I wanted flowers. Fields of them.

Normally I write about things that go well. Like this week I wrote a bitset template class, nothing super complex, but a few hundred lines of code. To my amazement it compiled without warning and passed its also-brand-new unit-test the first time. That doesn't happen very often. Occasionally I'll write about things that went pretty badly. Then there are the things that go spectacularly off the rails.

I was designing a faction select screen today. I want there to be approximately equal populations in each faction. While doing the layout, an old bias I noticed came to mind.

Last year I looked back at 2011 and made some predictions. I thought it would be good to take a look back at this year and see how I did on those predictions.

2012 was definitely the year of rendering. I had a vision for the look of my game and my biggest accomplishment this year was taking the first screenshot that actually looks like that vision.

Getting my Christmas list ready this year was sort of disappointing. In years past, I would ask for all the hottest new PC games and I had a lot to look forward to on Christmas morning. This year there were few big releases, and I already had Mass Effect 3. The only 2012 game on my list this year? Guild Wars 2.

I like big, complicated, 100 hour story driven games. I love Command and Conquer (haven't played a good one of those in years), Mass Effect (although I can't get into the final chapter) Bioware or Bethesda RPG's. I love to explore the worlds of MMO's. I really miss the space shooter genre - Freespace was so much fun, and getting Wing Commander 4 for Christmas so many years ago was the highlight of the day.

I think the fragmentation of the games market is getting me down. I don't have an iPad, or a Android phone, or an iPhone (I often feel like I'm the only one) I don't use Facebook, so all the effort that has gone into development of games for those platforms is wasted on me. And frankly, one session of Angry Birds was really enough.

I'm not a great artist. I did some drawing classes a few years ago which I quite enjoyed, but I didn't produce too many masterpieces -- although I liked this one:



I am decent with a camera -- I was working the macro lens a couple weekends ago shooting some kitchen items to try as textures. Sugar looks like diamonds, and icing sugar looks like weird rock formations. Shortly afterwards I found cgtextures.com which is an amazing resource for textures.

You may be able to tell, I've been having a whole lot of fun the last few weeks. As a programmer I was surprised at how wonderful and satisfying it is to put art into a game engine. It's not something I really got to do working on game engines at EA. With the new art in place, a couple weeks ago I took the first screenshot where I excitedly thought "I could show this to people and they wouldn't laugh!"

If you haven't already, check out Part I.

Things have been quiet on the blog the last couple of weeks but there has been lots of exciting progress behind the scenes. I purchased World Machine and modified my terrain import tool to read the beautiful World Machine height maps as well as its flow, deposition and wear maps.

I've increased the terrain heightmap resolution from 10 metres to 2.5 metres, and the improvement is startling. There is now lots of fine detail on the heightmap which makes it much more realistic and interesting. The rolling hills are officially retired.

I'm working on optimizing my terrain processing program a bit. I figure with the current process it goes through it will take a whopping 9 days full-tilt to process my terrain data. So I got out AMD CodeAnalyst to see what was taking the time. I was shocked that CodeAnalyst reported that my app was spending 91% of its time waiting on spinlocks.

I didn't believe it. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to check.

I was debugging a texture settings bug when I got this cool looking result:

It's a milestone. I'm working on my final rendering feature! With gamma correct Ambient/Diffuse/Specular throughout the world, hardware particles for effects (got those working a couple weeks ago) and some lovely shadows, I have but one big rendering issue left to address: Terrain 2.0.

My current terrain is a 300x300km USGS heightmap with 10m between samples and wang-tiled splatted textures, and it makes for beautiful rolling hills. But that isn't super-interesting as a play-space.

I took a couple days for hard thinking -- the hard thinking primarily due to the one big requirement I refuse to give up: a 300x300km terrain. It is amazing how many features go from simple to unwieldy when you scale them up.

Despite the hype, there's no doubt that Windows 8 Metro is just a regular Windows Desktop application. I was playing around the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and I tried Aurora Suite 2005, which is an accessibility program for Windows, when this happened:



Made me laugh seeing a standard Windows Desktop app running on top of Metro. I can click on the icons, and bring up the Aurora Suite menus, but as soon as I open a dialog, it switches back to the desktop. Aurora Suite uses Windows' HWND_TOPMOST feature.