Some big changes have been made to the look and layout of the menu. First, and probably most importantly, the menu can now be safely reloaded without restarting the entire game, so when you change resolution the GUI isn't the wrong size. It also fixes the problem where all the GUI textures are white (at least for me - the specific symptoms probably vary) on Windows after a resolution change. Continue reading »

I've finally gotten around to adding licensing information to the Coldest source code, so I've allowed anonymous access to the Subversion repository. Full information is available on the Download page.

It's not necessarily set up for easy building by other people, but if you're interested in doing so and the instructions provided don't work for you, post the problem in the forums and I'll do my best to help get you up and running.

Well, at least for me. Of course, I've been using Blender off and on for a few months, whereas I've been programming for 10 or 15 years so it's not surprising that the latter comes more easily to me at this point. The biggest thing isn't so much using Blender though. It does more cool stuff than I will ever learn to use, but the problem is that modelling is an artistic process and that's something I've always struggled with. Continue reading »

It turns out that my problems UV-unwrapping my simple wall model were caused by the normals of the faces being very, well, abnormal. Once I fixed that (it had something to do with ctrl-a, although I don't remember exactly what the option I used was - just ctrl-n to recalculate the normals didn't do it for some reason) the unwrapping was much more sane. In fact, the biggest problem I had was that I didn't realize my textures were upside-down from what they are in Blender so when I imported the model into the game it looked very wrong. Continue reading »

Performance is now at a point where I consider it truly acceptable. Despite what I said in my previous post, I went ahead and implemented my cache coherent heap class to try to improve performance, but it had essentially no effect. In retrospect that shouldn't have been surprising because actually the majority of the vertices were covered by my previous change, so even if it did improve the cache coherency it probably wasn't enough to be noticeable. On the plus side I think my vector-based heap class may come in handy for particles, so it wasn't a total loss. Continue reading »