Growing

Implemented the most complex mesh generator in any of my tools to date - it takes up a whopping 5k of space compressed, but the results should be worth it. No pictures until I have something really cool to show. Also found a few bugs in the material export/import stuff and addressed those.

Color Picking

Here's one thing that never came up until we saw it in the Farbrausch tools: a proper color picker. Well, we have one now. :)

Storage

Finished putting together a portable archive format for the tool. Should help a lot by keeping all the project files in one place when not working in an SVN repo.

Opensource

It's an opensource pandemic!
Farbrausch, Moppi, and now us too have released tool code into the wild. Not this one tho, as it's still in the works... But who knows, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea once there was a release with it :)

Also, I made some progress on a project file format that will enable projects to be a lot more portable than in their current mult-file state. The current version will also still be kept for svn based teamwork of course.

Refactor

Last weekend marked Breakpoint Revision 2012, and watching the stream gave me some motivation to refactor lower parts of the engine code that made me stop the project again back in august. Damned diamond inheritance issues. Now that that's out of the way I'll be able to move forward with the project slowly, once the deadline rush at work and the exams clear up.

Damn

Assembly has come and gone, and due to some work related stuff we didn't manage to finish anything again. This doesn't mean we're giving up on the project though, the keyframer is still up next. Apologies to Fairlight for not making it to the compo this year either and also congratulations for a kickass release again :)

[mzx] Here we go.

A good sign towards a good intro soundtrack (or executable music) so far seems to be the necessity to fix bugs which were there for years and slipped through, because they never really used this tight.

So yeah, started on the music. Jotted down some good ideas for the basic hooks a week ago, now have a basic theme, even a bit of a heel-turn which might be excellent if we can pull it off properly. Production sounds good so far, not as tight as I'd like it but we're still only about 24 hours in, and I didn't EQ much right now and the frequencies to fill in sound pretty obvious. Listening to it now I can say it's very catchy, and also very much unlike anything we've done so far, though in a sense it does sound like a logical continuation of Actuator. Size-wise we're at ~5k, plenty of headroom still. Might even squeeze some movie samples in later.

The biggest worry I have right now is (as always) the song structure, because like it or not, it's always consensual when it comes to collaborative effort like intro-making: Even basic concepts like "the introductory part is too long", "I'd like a breakdown here" or "That edit seems unnecessary" can be (and have been) subjects for a heated debate simply because most of us have ideas for how the final product should look/feel like, and they don't always match. That said, I'm a firm believe that a good song is a good song and visuals more adaptive, so I chose a different approach this time: I make the song, finish it as much as I can (or let's say up to 80-90%), they get an end product, and they take it or leave it. I've made soundtracks for 4 of our 64ks so far, and in hindsight the ones that became successful / memorable were the ones where I assumed free rains over most of the music and only asked for opinion (and NOT pointers) late in the process. It's a gamble worth taking.

The next step will be, I guess, to map out the song structure.