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Shader-based lighting will be straightforward, vanilla block lighting will require faking. I'm not sure how much faking will be necessary to look good. The simplest thing would be to compare the overlapping regions, and take the max of the block lights and the min of the sky lights as the updated values. If you flew by something lit up, the light would clip through walls, but we can see how distracting that actually is. If it's not good enough, we will have to revisit the graphics pipeline again and see if we can optimize a path for re-lighting.

That sounds like a work for another 3 months or so ...

Yay, more delays.

Don't worry. It's the same 3 month delay, just allocated differently.

In any case, we should be able to get by for some time without doing any merging of the lighting. Self-lighting will still work just fine, and that's the more noticeable one.

Fr0stbyte, just out of curiosity, when was the last time you actually touched the code for Futurecraft?

I've actually been keeping track. The last time I made any appreciable progress in the code was mid March. There's a lot of setup time involved, and it's not something I can just jump into for an hour or two. I do get a lot out of the discussions, though. Talking through how it is all going to work is a big part of my development process and helps to refine the system when I don't have a lot of time to sit down with it.

I'm not happy at all with the amount of time I've been able to invest in this project, nor the fact that my real job never seems to afford me time to do much beyond eat and sleep. I've been learning a lot this past year; I can do things now in half a day which used to take me a week, but the scope of the work has grown alongside it. I think I'm almost done, but I've been thinking that for the last five months, so I can't say that with any confidence. At the very least, once this is done, I'm not likely to see another project of this scale for a long time.

Regarding Futurecraft, the plan hasn't changed, and I really doubt our scope is going to increase appreciably from here on out. We'll get it done. Right now, the really useful stuff other people can do is the modeling and texturing work being done with the Flans mod, and the regular discussion, as haphazard as those are. Remember, I'll be taking on a support role during the content phase, so the success of the game half will be everyone's responsibility.

Yea which gives me a good reason to worry we won't make any progress in that matter at all as it is nice we all big mouths talk all day but really nothing is being done and don't blame it on "disagreements" - everyone agrees that we'll need flashy big lasers for the ships or new building materials which is mostly texture work, BTW flashy stuff is a priority in that dev process to attract more attention. Actually as a matter of fact who is capable of modding MC right now ? On the level of adding new materials at least ? (which is BTW quite a basic level)

I can add basic materials, but I am rather crap at it, I have no idea how to make it do anything as I don't actually understand half of what I code in.

And about the massive disagreements, some very good and valid points do arise, however most people don't spot them, but that's fine, I can sort through the crap to find useful stuff.

Can there be an in-game digital camera. like screenshots but actually stored on an in-game SD card and displayable over monitors.
Another thing I just realised is vital for the camera: in-game SD cards and Handheld Data Storage.

Yea , just why would you need them ? What do you have to store ?

Iv121 wrote:Yea , just why would you need them ? What do you have to store ?

In game sexy times?

Iv121 wrote:Yea , just why would you need them ? What do you have to store ?

Perhaps reconnaissance of an enemy or whatever?

What is "recon of the enemy ?", and how you plan to "view" it ? Making this thing will only make sense if we add programmable computers like in computercraft and I wonder how difficult that will be and also I'm afraid not many will be able to use this future skill wise as well not everyone's a programmer ...

Yeah I see how a camera could come in handy. Maybe instead of a specific memory storage device just for storing images, we have an all-use type thingy that can store blueprints and letters and such too. Then just plug it into a compy and select the thing from a menu.

That's sort of what a data pad will do. Hold information to be transferred to a more specialized device. And also perform basic functions.