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• recruitment.ssnt.org - it’s utterly out of date, and noone should use it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!

And they are, anyone Who watched B5 should find that obvious. It took me 40 hours to get a decent shadow effect going and it’s still buggy as a Zerg swarm. Regarding bugs, a Colonel from Starcraft have the following to say:

“I used to think that defeating the Zerg would take precise military maneuvers, clever tactics and strong leadership. I was wrong. You can’t out-think the swarm, you can’t out-maneuver the swarm, and you certainly can’t break the morale of the swarm. I hate to admit this, but I could do my job just as well if I ordered all my men to simply shoot anything that moves.”

See, the best way to deal with bugs seemed to be sitting there and punch away at keyboard until they are dead or you pass out, whichever comes first. but before I pass out …

Enter Said it’d be a good idea to get some shade in the game. And I added it just for him. Although right now it’s not blended with textures, Specular map or Self Illumination, It will be.

Oh by the way, I think the galaxy would be a better place if all Sith spend all their time programming shaders. There’d be a lot less Sith, and just as much dark side.

-Darth Ikhthus, Dark lord of the FISH

After extensive testing (read: chat with people who downloaded it). It’s confirmed that physics Demo requires DirectX SDK 9 to run. Since that SDK is like a 200+ MB package, it may not be such a great idea to make it a requirement. Rest assured it’s unintentional and whatever we write next will not require a titanic package to run.

The package itself is being looked at. I am currently considering completely replace it with something better after … something very secret happens. This is the last post in this posting spree.

Oh by the way, for those who live in united states, Belated happy 4th of July, because, you know, I was totally passing out from games on the fourth.

- The Fish

Studying brains is no excuse not to work on this once in a while, huh.

First comes first, I have had a look at the rotation system. And found this:

_rot_rate += D3DXVECTOR3

(som.x / _moi.x,

som.y / _moi.y,

som.z / _moi.z);

The Angular velocity seemed to be added correctly. Subsequent test reveal that precession does happen in engine. You have to spin pretty quickly for it to be obvious, though …

As per Enter’s request, I am implementing shadow Maps. Shadow volume seemed to be a pretty dead end after some investigation, primary because:

1. Depth Pass will break if the camera is in shadow. This will happens a lot thanks to the shadows cast by planets.
2. Depth Fail will consume an enormous amount CPU power when to produce the caps. Since physics will also consume a lot of CPU power, this will not do well for the performance.

I am trying to understand the samples that came with SDK. Hopefully I will figure it out before getting into trouble for not concentrating on studying.

Oh Firelance, according to knowledge I have being provided during study of the brain, zombie outbreak is an extremely improbable scenario. For starters, the muscles are no longer capable of contracting once the Calmodulin signaling pathway breaks down. And that pathway requires active ATPase linked Calcium pumps … which of course require a functional Citric Acid Cycle…

No offense, but Aric James is about as scientifically sound as Most CCTSM’s inventions …

[Edit by CCTSM: Hey! If the inventions work, they're entirely scientifically sound - if they weren't, how would they work?]

Some new spammer seem to have come around. So after recieving six “plz moderate this” mails today, I’ve decided to tell WordPress to stop mailing me when a comment is held for moderation.

In effect, this means that if you don’t have a previously approved comment (Read: If you’re not Thorin, Nerdfish, or myself), you can’t comment. Post on the forums if you want to be allowed to comment, or mail me.

In other news, I think there’s been zero progress since last post. Oh, yea. Enter might be doing things. Um. Yeah. Until next time!