Long time, no blog. Anyone still out there ?

Finally, just under a year after the last release, planetGenesis 1.9 has crawled out from under the covers. As always it's available from sourceforge. New noises, new functions and new drawing code :-) .

There's also a version that has had the package structure rearranged so it can be used as a plug-in to other Java apps. See a quick render of a sphere in sunflow using pG to texture it here on the sunflow forum

pG 3.x is likely to head more down the postGenesis route, but still written in Java, see my much earlier blogs.

Oxidizer is now up to version 0.5.2 and finally has a version of Apo's triangle editor. It's not something I wanted to add originally as it was a bit to much like ripping off Apo and I wanted Oxidizer to have it's own identity and head more down the genome evolution path. Well now it has the best of both worlds.

Oxidizer is where my attention will be spent next, bringing the flam3 version up to date, the deciding which of the idea's the community wants next.

Still here...

So what have I been up to recently...
Development wise I not done a lot, initially due to be being busy at work, but now due to be not being busy at work.

Alright, I know...

Around 2 months ago my job was put under threat of redundancy. As the company in question was expecting to make over 100 people redundant in one foul they legally have to go through a 90 day consultancy period before formally giving notice. That day is still a month away, but I now know that I will definitely been amongst those 100 people. The whole thing has pretty much sapped any enthusiasm I have for coding especially the coupled with the flam3 code breakage (more below).

There as been some progress however...

I have rewritten the planetGenesis code that handles the links between components so now a user can drag a join over a component and then release it, inserting the component in the middle of the join.

I've also introduced a new type of component, a Post Processing component, this takes a complete terrain and processes it further. No actual useful components for it
yet though although I do have a Erosion component that shows some promise.

pG has had a lot more changes though as the project has gained a new developer, Sid Datta. He has added a persistent dialogue panel on the right of pG screen, and selected components are now highlighted.

So what about Oxidizer? I've took a break from Oxidizer since, as mentioned above, recent changes to the flam3 library have borked it. It’s to do with pthreads in a library, Cocoa event handling and memory management and how none of them work together very well. I may back out a version of flam3 and backport the variation changes to get a release out and give me some more time, and them think about
either forking or shelling out to flam3 instead of compiling in the code.

Dave

planetGenesis

I've been a little quite recently, this was due to a number of things.

I've been playing with the Terragen 2 Technical Preview

I bust my typing finger playing football (the type you play with a ball and feet).

So I've been giving my finger a rest.

I've also been giving Oxidizer a rest too, and had a play with planetGenesis instead. This has lead to the first release for 14 months...hoo-rah.

So the new bits are...

The Noise Menu has been split into differrent noise types.

New Noises
Worley noises now have a new distance metric, QuasiEuclidean.
There's a new Worley noise, BiasedWorley.
LinearSandDunes is a new noise that creates linear sand dunes.

New Combiners
- WarpX, WarpY and WarpZ.
These take the value generated by the left hand side noise and add it to
either the X, Y or Z co-ordinate feed to the right hand side noise.

Oxidizer has seen some action, it's been updated to the latest flam3 version, and there's also a start of lua scripting. All these are only available from CVS, and the lua scripting is very limited at the moment.