Tworenas Snapshot 002

Yup, it's out one day sooner. I was late a few hours with the Snapshot 001, so this makes us even. No, actually the main reason to push it out sooner is so that I can get in a few hours of work today on Snapshot 003. Snapshot 3 will be slightly less ambitious. I am so tired of avoiding the buggy grass code so I'm thinking that Snapshot 3 should bring back grass, together with user controlled placement, like everything else in the engine. And I'll probably have time for a large scale smoothing tool, so we can get that "Foundation" button enabled. It works even now, but without smart terrain smoothing, I avoided showing it of.

So here is a video with some of the new features:

With fewer announcements to make,  I can give you a few controls. I won't talk about most. Half the keyboard does something. If you manage to load up a map, there are a few important controls. The first thing you should do is press "C" and put as many points as you can into the skill tree. This should take care of the painfully slow starting walk speed. Then, the GUI is mouse driven. Pressing left or right mouse button does things based on what tool is selected. Ctrl is a modifier, so each tool has 4 possible actions. Try it out!

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.

Link: Snapshot 002

Changelog:

• Throwing is back. Throw small cubic chairs with 4 different strengths! 
• The engine now support alternate rendering profiles. A single new profile has been added that has the potential to make it as the new default rendering profile. It is turned off by default, but you can swap between them with the lower-case 'L' key: 'l'. Not to be confused with '1', the digit one. The new profile has stronger bump mapping effect because light caused bumps and ambient bump mapping are no longer destructively overlapping. Properties of light circleing objects and spherical harmonics are also different.
• Module system has been updated to support models. Full support is yet not available.
• The system hub has a new incomplete model manager.
• The engine now support running in a frame-less window.
• The options dialog allows you to control the frame of the window. Might exhibit some rare bugs. It can also be used to change the terrain quality.
• More system keys are available while in system hub mode.
• The engine now uses less considerably less array indexing when rendering models.
• I managed to render to floating point surfaces. Might enable HDR or other rendering methods in the future.
• Temporary hacky fix for the far-plane clip artifacts on terrain.

Bugixes:

• Fixed a few more bugs related to mouse state management (yet again).
• B005: Falling off the world corrupts the save file. When loading it, the engine will crash. Fixed. If you have a save file affected by this bug, you will have to delete it and create a new one. New saves are not affected by this bug. Can't fix it retroactively because the save format changes from snapshot to snapshot at these early stages.
• Fixed a bug with reading floats from XML. This could fail based on your system's internationalization settings (1.1 vs. 1,1).