There’s a reason for the unusually long gap between builds: wedding here in the tropics tomorrow, then honeymoon somewhere else. I’ll be back in business in a couple of weeks – although I’m still sneaking in some work on the laptop when ideas for the new collision response algorithms strike!

Until then ~

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the well wishes and very kind comments! We’re done and married, and will enjoy the relaxing latter half of our two weeks now. 😉

It may seem like things are slow going, but I assure you that we’re being more productive than ever behind the scenes here at Data Realms HQ. Arne has been cranking out an incredible amount of new art assets for pretty much every aspect of the game.

I’m talking several new craft (with complete gib sets), humanoid actors, entire sets of bunker modules, etc… It’ll take a while to get it all implemented (read: not by next build), but that won’t stop us from teasing you in the mean time! 😉

So we thought we’d push a build out this last weekend, but then we came up with this and that to add, and then all of a sudden there’s a serious need to overhaul the core physics code! In essence we’re going to try to squash some of the old core physics engine problems like sinking objects and inconsistently mushy terrain.

So, along with a whole lot of other major improvements (e.g. scenes are very easy to make now, no more silly contours), we’ll take some more time to really get into overhauling the physics integrator and collision response code.

In the mean time, here’s a little surrealistic teaser:

UPDATE:
For the curious, this describes one of the things we’re actually doing to the physics engine:
http://www.gaffer.org/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/
It, combined with a lot more bugfixing and tweaking in collision response code will help prevent MovableObject-Terrain sinking, as well as MO-MO interpenetration and consequent explosions. We’re also considering swapping out the integrator, but not sure yet if it’s something we can retrofit into the current way the engine works.