Will it pass?

I went though a crunch time this weekend making sure that everything is good for snapshot 3. I think I even managed to do some harm :).

There are tons of small touches everywhere, most of them visual so I'll only list the big ones:

• The launcher is now a launcher and is all polished up.
• New option to control LOD switcher aggressiveness. This option was detailed in the previous post.
• Floors have caught up technologically to item creation...

Well, sort of! I am wary of introducing such a huge change one day before snapshot 3. So the new terrain builder can do the work, but instead it only measures, calculates and estimates. I added 3 tons of asserts and checks making sure that these measurements are the same as the old builder provided. By snapshot 4 I'll have enough data and confidence to go with the new floors.

Still, the new scrolling weights plus the speed plus the added cost of measurements may have added a slight jerkiness to scrolling on some machines, only in top down mode. I am afraid to change anything more before snapshot 3 is uploaded.

So right now I'm of to write instructions on IndieDB for controls and after that I'll start the upload and notify you with link once it is done.

But here's the thing with IndieDB: everything you do needs to be approved. Can't say that I mind since it seems to raise the quality and make it a more pleasant corner of the Internet, but sometimes it can get annoying. I wanted to say hi to IndieDB community so I posted a small news article saying hi and saying a few words about what to expect from future releases. The post took over a day to get approved, and then it got archived, meaning that it is still there and accessible, but only for people who go directly to my profile. So the rest of the community has no idea I posted some news. not a huge problem because of the content, but what happens if this is done to some very important news. About dwarven terrorists among you!

The thing I am trying to say: even though I upload today, it may take a day or two for the approval process to finish once once it does there is no telling what the result it. I'll keep you posted.

In other news, I am investigating for a way to merge my meshes into some kind of a blog format. I really don't like a ton of files messing up my folders. I think I know a format that will greatly reduce loading times. .obj are not knows for their fast loading times. I hate loading times.

And an interesting fact: I switched Blender versions a while ago. I haven't reexported my meshes in ages, but I did try to do so yesterday. Here is the result for barrels:

The lighting is all different. Come to think of it, this makes more sense considering what lights setup I use, but it is still too bright and shinny. So I have two choices: revert Blender version or redo lighting.

What do you think about this shading model. It is far to bright, I am right? On the other hand it finally has some specularity to it. In the past it did not work. Have you ever noticed specularity in any of my screenshots/snapshots? Could this be caused just by the Blender version switch? The old one had two check boxes: one for normals and one for "high quality" normals. The new version has only a check box for exporting normals.

And I can't seem to get rig of the annoying seams. Could it be that normals one one side of the seam are different that on the other and this is causing a shift in the intensity of the light?