Ethan

I have this problem where until things are good enough, I don't like to use them, which is a problem since it means I didn't post for a few days while I was working on the site. I've been working on the site content a little bit with some help from Chiz, and Carl sent me a new really pretty graphic for the station. Carl had some ideas on what we could do to place scenery in the healbeam levels, but they turned out to trigger some weird bugs in ODE. I really would like to get to the bottom of the problem, which was something like this:

• a very massive object connected by rope (i.e. slider joint connected to a hinge joint) to another object
• result: the rope did weird things like push the massive object towards the anchor point, or away from it, at times when it shouldn't have.

The absolutely fascinating part of this was that it only manifested when you called the setAxis() method on the slider joint! Completely fascinating, and completely freaking ridiculous. So although there's now a Rope shape, we aren't gonna use it for placing scenery. We'll still have lots of scenery, though, I bet.

OK, my next priority is using Dime to parse the DXF from the CAD program I've been using to design levels. Also, I need to continue optimizing the codebase, because the station with all the pretty graphics Carl's been sending me is still a little below 30 FPS. I think I can do some clever tricks with the background, but I have to see.

Ethan