Blog

• Asteroids straight ahead

  published on 8/8/2006 7:22 PM

  Assembly came and went. There was some very good demos there so I hope you checked it out. Got some ideas for some new effects also. But I have a whole bunch of them as it is. All I now need is time.

  The render options window looks good now. I fixed the installer script also. Now I'm currently working on saving the selected scenes. This has proved to be a rather tricky thing to do in a good way. Simply because the requirements I have conflicts with each other. I want it to be east to use. Yet still allow updates of scenes when a new update is out. The problem there is that I also want to support changing of attributes within the scene without starting the full editor. That of course conflicts with the support updates of scenes. Lets just say it continues like that for a while. Yesterday I think I got a system that should be.. acceptable. So I'll go with that. The first version will only be a beta release anyway and I doubt that many people will get. So I can change it to something better in a future release.

  Another problem that I have been fighting with for a few months is the aspect problem. Example. Say you have a matrix trails effect. You set it to 50 columns. But then you view the same effect on a dual monitor setup. So now you want 100 columns instead otherwise the characters looks stretched. I have had some ideas to solve this problem but none has worked as well as I had hoped. So now it seems to only way to handle this is to create scenes that are specifically made for a specific number of monitors. Quite a lot of scenes wont have this problem but some will.

  The users support is also in. This is so all options (Render modes, selected scenes and so forth) will be saved in your windows user directory so if you share your computer with someone they will have their own settings.

  The asteroid node has had some well needed updates. Among other things the aim is better and it will also reset the scene faster. No more waiting for 5 minutes for him to get that last slow moving asteroid.

  Lets end it with a screenshot

  ![http://www.plane9.com/forumimages/2006-07-25-asteroids.png) The asteroids scene on a dual monitor setup