I found free model for my new game, just don’t sure, will it fits well in a voxel world.

I finally made Glow engine cross-platform, and first platform except Windows is Google NACL - technology which allows to run native C/C++ code in a browser window. I will write about it more specifically later. I am really excited now by ability to run game directly from link and deploy it without any installation steps directly to user (on Windows, Linux and MacOS)!

It’s impossible to know C++ completely. Next code will fail to link(GCC) - undefined variable:

template <typename T>;
struct core_type
{
public:
	static  int m_var;
};

struct  test_type: public core_type<test_type>;
{
	int m_another_var;
};

template<>; int core_type::m_var;

If change last line to

template<>; int core_type::m_var=0;

it compiles succesfully!

And it’s proper behavior ISO/IEC 14882 (14.7.3.15) says that an explicit specialization of a static data member of a template is a definition only when it includes an initializer. There is no syntax to define it with default value.

Visual Studio handles it without any error.

I applied some optimization to the mesh generation. Previously, voxel mesh was generated as-is, with removing only internal faces. It creates huge amount of vertex data, which was slowly loaded into gpu, slowly processed on cpu etc. New algorithm reduce vertex data in 3-4 times, but slightly increase time of mesh generation. Also, one possible minus of new algorithm - it will be hard to apply ambient occlusion, based on vertexes (it’s not regular mesh now), but I hope my version of SSAO will handle it.

It’s new version of mesh generation.

I moved blog and site to Amazon Elastic Cloud - spent several days on that. Previously I pay around 10 USD per month on Hostgator hosting, but decided to switch to free  (tr1.micro, 1st year) Amazon hosting. Basically because it was interesting to try Amazon services and play with virtual machine. It provided to you without any additional services, so you should install everything manually. Also it can be scaled very easily and you pay as much as you spend.

Linux was chosen for virtual machine, after that I installed MySQL, Apache server, ftp and WordPress. Several useful links:  WordPress Installation, Ftp.

Hope my readers will receive that post via RSS :)

I play with grass these days. Texture of grass should be changed to something more cubic.

I reached point, where my art skills is not enough to use it in Tarta project, so I am looking for talented artist to help with it. Please write private message or comment, if interested.

And some pictures from current stage of development - probably character for multiplayer (free model from Turbosquid.com). I choose that

Grass with temporary model (should be changed)

I played a little with grenades and increased radios of explosions.

Cool, today I implemented update of voxel field in multiplayer environment. Currently update of voxels is sent per chunk of voxels (32x32x64) and compressed by RLE. Implemented using UDP networking, as other client-server communication. Update of voxel field is done on server and sent to client.