We are back from the dead again! Fear the undead.

The Phoenix has been given a facelift thanks to Enterprise-E.

Since one picture is worth 1000 words, this post is already too long.

Edit by CCTSM: Proper image thumb, typo & grammar fixes as usual.
Also, this is apparently an attack carrier, which fires missiles. Or so the fish says;
I’m repeating it here because I have no fucking clue what these things are anymore.
And I assume there is some poor unsuspecting sod that visits and has the same lack of a clue.

I’ve upgraded Wordpress from 2.2.3 to 2.5.1, which is a fairly substantial upgrade - especially the admin backend is pretty different. However, this did break several of my hacks (recent posts in sidebar, gallery, etc), but it’s been fixed now.

This should ensure the continued smooth operation of the site, as well as increase both functionality and security.

The problem with the character-not-recognized “box of death” has also been corrected - I fixed that a while ago on my own WP install, but didn’t get around to doing it here until now. So funky characters, like Word’s concaternated “…” character, the angled quotes, etc works fine now.

-CCTSM

The SSNT team has decided that all objects should be represented by teapots in the SSNT engine. This includes celestial bodies, systems of spacecrafts and all particle effects.

Extensive change will be made to the physics and graphics engine to optimize the rendering and simulation of large number of Teapots.

This comes from the realization that most of the universe is composed of Celestial Teapots, and their interaction determines the fate of the universe. As such they are the most important aspect of space combat.

The Lab at the university came online earlier today, signaling the end of the brief development section. During this time, The interface code was completed:

Along with implementing the interface, the fish has sorted various files into their own directories, as well as adding an icon to the application.

The bad news is that tactical overlay and unit AI weren’t implemented yet, so effectively, there is nothing to show.

Since I finally got around to setting up a SVN module on the server (which was troublesome to say the least), I had a quick chat with Nerdfish and we decided to set up a repository for the SS&T source.

This will make it easier for everyone to access the latest copies of the sourcecode, and also make editing it more consistent - and actually allow for sensible multi-user edits.

If you want to access it, please point your SVN client to http://svn.gpio.org/ssnt - you can use your web browser to just download the files too, but it’s not recommended.

The repository allows full read access for anonymous users; if you’d like to commit something, you need to be registered on the forums, and have a SVN account - ask me for it. If you just have some minor changes, just create a patch and send it over, and we’ll merge it.

You should also review the guideline and howto before using the repository, or if you’re having trouble with it.

I might also go over the solution (not the code) to see if I can’t figure out how to make it compile regardless of the environment it’s in. It’s currently somewhat tied to Nerdfish’s folder structure.

Well, after feeling a bit annoyed at the fact that all the documentation is generally spread across 25 files (which contain incorrect URLs and look like crap), I decided to take on the gigantic project of reformatting, editing, and compiling it all into sensible documents.

So, all the old physics/gameplay/etc documents are now gone. If you really want them, they’re hiding somewhere on the server, have fun finding them. Anyhow, I did a quick query before deleting the DB entries: SELECT SUM(downloads) FROM `downloads` WHERE category=”pdf” AND name!=”" AND SUBSTR(name, 1, 4) != “uecv” -> 1699. 1699 downloads of silly little documents.

Oh well.

Anyhow, the new ones can be found below, as well as in the download section:
SS&T Engine documentation (92 pages, 551 kB)
SS&T Gameplay documentation (28 pages, 232 kB)
The Tor’val (13 pages, 156 kB)

I might update the styling on the Frontier books themselves, but there won’t be any editing - I’ve already spent 15-20 hours dealing with the current mangled mess.

Enjoy.

As you may have noticed, there’s been a couple small problems with the site after the upgrade.

To try and fix these, I’ve upgraded Wordpress to the latest version (2.2.3), and I hope that it might help. I’ll update this post whenever I’ve finished testing it.

Update: Everything seems to work just fine now. Yey!

If you’re getting a “Connection reset” or other connection-related errors (especially after seeing the site begin to load), please just refresh the page until it loads, and feel free to post in the forum thread to let me know.

Oh, and if you see anything else broken on the site (likely due to the WP upgrade), you should also post.

-CCTSM

Admittedly my method of implementing shadow is weird. First, I Render The object with shadow shader, but without textures. resulting in a black and gray model and a Z buffer. Then I rendered the textured modeled right no top of that with a Z offset and alpha blending. Of course it took a while to figure out all the oddness in DX. The solution is apparently ….

inline DWORD F2DW( FLOAT f ) { return *((DWORD*)&f); }
Device->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SLOPESCALEDEPTHBIAS, F2DW(-8.0f));

Yeah, why Typecast and take the address and follow pointer ? why negative numbers ? beats me, that’s just what turned out to work. Now if this is not bloody weird I don’t know what is.

Moving on to Unit Control as per Enter’s request, as soon as I find time. Meh, can’t ever really leave this project alone …

Well, I actually need to do that in real-life too..

Anyhow: Since upgrading the server, I’ve been going over everything and checking if it works or not. Surprisingly, it generally does. However, on that note, I spotted a ton of old stuff lying around. So I’ve decided to clean up the old gunk noone uses. For instance, the redirects to gpio.org (tools.ssnt.org -> tools.gpio.org) are now gone, as is the old and unused wiki. The forums are a bit buggy, please see this thread. Oh, and oldforums.ssnt.org is now http://forums.ssnt.org/old/, although they’re kind of broken (but have been like that forever).

If there is any site you’re now missing terribly, please e-mail me immediately. I’m keeping backups of everything, but they will eventually be deleted.

List of things I’d like to get rid of:

• modssnt.ssnt.org - just a page saying it’s terminated
• bday.ssnt.org - random images that were linked from a forum post posted years ago
• recruitment.ssnt.org - it’s utterly out of date, and noone should use it
• private.ssnt.org - random non-public sources. Should be moved or deleted

Please comment/post on the forums about your thoughts on these - I’d rather delete them all, but it’s up to you. I’ll go add a link to the wiki in the header here.

Have fun!

-CCTSM

Shadow has being successfully implemented, and hopefully decals did not break in the progress. I will wait for some ships to get finished then work on structural recursion. Here is a shot of final shadow effect - and it looks a lot hotter in motion!