Tworenas Snapshot 001

So it is finally time! I think I managed to get a very stable minimal version ready that will serve as the foundation of all further snapshots. This doesn't mean it is not buggy. It is probably very buggy and might do anything from displaying these bugs to crashing to resulting in World War III.

So a few things before we get started: you will need Microsoft .NET runtime in order to execute the engine. Probably version 4.0 will do, but I'm not sure how Microsoft packages their distributables: do you get 4.0 from installing 4.5 or is 4.5 an add-on. Anyway, 3 or 3.5 won't do. You also need sadly probably the last version of XNA 4.0 that will ever see the light of day. Finally, you need a computer with a GPU that can handle XNA HiDef profile. In a couple of snapshots I might get around to providing two versions, one for HiDef and one for Reach. And one more thing: currently the engine is optimized to run at 60 FPS or higher. If you are getting lower framerates, physics might not sync up perfectly with this rate and it may seem less smooth to you. I'll try to make smoothness less reliant on framerate in the future.

There is one more important thing to mention: I did not manage to find time to create a configuration dialog, so the engine will run in 720p on high quality settings by default. You can press Alt-Enter to make it fullscreen and you can reduce the quality at runtime, but you'll have to do this every launch. Persistent settings are coming in snapshot 2, at least in the form of an INI file. Vertical synchronization is on by default, so you shouldn't see any framerate higher than your monitor's refresh rate.

BY AGREEING TO DOWNLOAD THIS SOFTWARE, YOU TAKE TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY CONSEQUENCE RESULTING FROM THE USE OR MISUSE OF THE SOFTWARE. I AM NOT TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY POSSIBLE HARM THAT CAN BE CAUSED BY THE SOFTWARE NOR DO I GUARANTEE THAT IT IS FIT FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE INTEGRITY OF THE SOFTWARE WILL BE PRESERVED WHILE BEING TRANSFERRED ON ANY AND ALL MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

I hope that legal mumbo-jumbo is able to protect me from whatever ill consequence that may arise. Any piece of consumer electronics can break down and it would be a shame if by coincidence that would happen as someone runs the engine. This is very unlikely because it is not that heavy on the system and it should only get lighter.

Link: Snapshot 001

This isn't a permanent location for it. I know that it won't get any downloads so I can safely store it on my Dropbox, but when i think that something will get downloaded, I'll put it somewhere else so my Dropbox won't get clogged up :).

It is just a little bit too early to give you a  full list of controls. With snapshots 2 having more of a user interface, I'll leave snapshot 1 destined for guesswork.

Changelog: 

• Terrain is not longer a singleton. The engine officially supports any number of terrain objects, but for now only uses one.
• Terrain support has been moved 90% to the general purpose library. The library is now 440 KiB of code.
• Created a window creation helper component to make GUI code shorted and a primordial screen system to isolate game screens.

Bugfixes:

• Every single smallish bug I could find and fix.
• B003: Massive memory leaks in the new word manager. Every time you use it to load or generate a new world, some resources remain in use. Eventually you will run out of RAM. Fixed.