Devlog - Improved terrain, grass and news on multiplayer

September 25, 2008

New procedural grass in action (it moves in dynamics):
Procedural grass
Procedural grass

Recent changes:

  • Splatting shaders for terrain with 16 texture slots available.
  • Improved terrain editing in ResourceEditor (editing of splatting maps; automatical conversion of textures and clipmaps; 'g' hotkey resets pivot point, like in UnigineEditor).
  • Fixed terrain tesselation.
  • New "Clipmap" tool for converting textures into clipmaps and vice versa.
  • Optimized polygon count in the sky.
  • Image class can load multi-channel PSD textures as 3D ones.
  • BASE particles renamed to BILLBOARD.
  • No more PhongRim shading and color noise on vegetation with low shaders profile.
  • Correct detection of AMD videocards in Linux.
  • unigine.mat is splitted into several material libraries.
  • Updated generator of project files for Visual Studio.
  • Handling of NumLock, CapsLock and ScrollLock buttons.
  • Support of streams (Stream is a base class for File and Socket now) for save/restore system.
  • FileBase class renamed to Stream.
  • Access to world nodes via C++ API.
  • It's possible to transfer classes with inheritance through the C++ API now.
  • Fixed bug with members of inherited classes in UnigineScript.
  • More strict accordance to Vista UAC (all user-writable data is stored inside user's home directory, use "project" argument during Engine initialization to override the location).
  • More correct FPS calculation.
  • Full control of mouse and keyboard events by means of UnigineScript.
  • "reference" field in widgets for external references.
  • NOW font wrapping is working.
  • Smart language switching for GUI L10n, one only needs to call ui.update() after changing locale.
  • Hotkey bindings for UnigineEditor can be altered from the editor itself.
  • New procedural ObjectGrass: 2 LODs, fast geometry generation by CPU, support of density masks and a lot of other adjustable parameters.
  • Added ObjectGrass sample.

It was decided to revert back to terrain splatting instead of huge clipmaps, which are too unconvenient for editing by artists.

There are also important news regarding network support. Right now we have syncronization of world nodes over the network almost ready, it will be available as a sample in Unigine SDK soon. We use a 3rd-party software for transport layer now, later it will be replaced by our in-house module. At the moment a dedicated developer (Anna "ANet" Ishina) is working on our networking issues, a lot of research work has already done, so we plan to complete our multiplayer solution in 5-6 months.