Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Sorry, no release today

There's some small outstanding glitches I'm not happy with, mainly to do with slipgate light colours. Each slipgate light brush generates up to 5 colour sources (normally 4 - 3 visible sides and the top), and there are normally 4 of these brushes in a typical configuration, meaning that we get a LOT of heavily saturated red with a fairly sharp transition line at the edge. It only really affects maps where these are present without any compensating colour sources being nearby, but it's ugly enough to warrant fixing.



Now, I could fix this by just hard-coding special cases, but I want to make the program as generally useful as possible, so that's an absolute last resort. The real challenge is to find a solution that doesn't wreck standard isolated colour sources. So far it's been a coupla evenings of bashing at it, but if there is a solution I hope it won't take much longer.

Now the really bad part - I'm off on holidays/vacation for the next week, so there's another gap in work coming up. Maybe it'll be good for solving these problems to get away, hopefully some kinda Zen effect will happen.

I appreciate that it's a bit of a pain having all these delays, but it WILL be worth it in the end. I'm VERY conscious of the fact that the first version of this utility I ever wrote, many years ago, ended up being used to generate LIT files which had some embarrassing glitches in them, but which were subsequently circulated quite widely. I intend to avoid such a situation with this one. Trouble is, once LITs generated by this do get out, the damage will have been done and we'll be past the point of no return with it. Maybe I'm fretting needlessly, but I don't believe that's in anyone's best interest.

Worst case is I just release the program with no LITs, and let anyone who wants light their maps themselves. This isn't so bad as it sounds, the Windows interface and PAK file support make it very newbie-friendly, and the speed (about 1 minute for an ID1 episode) helps a lot. Not much use to anyone on Linux or OS X who wants to join the party though.

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