And up and running again!

So I got an old video card (a ATI Radeon 5850) to replace the one that went kaput yesterday, and I’m up and running again…

Today I started by fixing the stuff I broke on the Skydancer with the latest polish changes in the game… I actually forgot to take screenshots, but basically the windows were flowing (since they were made with the water tile), the engines were also flowing (lava material there), the system was trying to put some height around the water (this was particularly terrible), and I had crashes when I moved to a place where the preloader would kick in…

So, all of those things got fixed, and I started working on the preload of planets, which demands I write some code for “early out”… Since the planet generation takes about 30-40 seconds, if I skip a lot of planets at once, the game will still be computing the first planet by the time I get to the third one, so it will have to wait for a while to be able to go down to it… This is a nasty piece of code, to be honest, because I didn’t think about it when I designed it, so the code is not exactly clean (it’s really a succession of things, with lots of temporary stuff that needs to be cleared up)…

So, now this is how it looks… The new shader for the engines looks sweet, but it will be used in all the lava that doesn’t have anywhere to go!

Now listening to “The Diary” by “The Gentle Storm”