Ah, what a week (or so)… my back is still knackered 🙁 consequently I can’t get back into the ‘run’ of things Dom-dev-wise due to the constant pain. My main dev-pc has ‘died’ with an SSD failure (only discovered after months of running checkdisk every launch, suspecting malware/virus and re-installing Windows7 twice, and resorting to Windows8 out of desperation). Plus Age of Ascent pops onto Kickstarter and will (quite rightly) get funded, delivering everything I want Dom to be… sigh.
Well, nearly everything 😉 Besides, I’m frankly sceptical (but optimistically hopeful!) on the “16,000 vessels” being real players…
To add insult to (literally) injury – that ‘bug’ I reported against the Intel HD5000 driver – the one that had never appeared in 6 months of development on my ATI or nVidia based system? It appeared on my ATI based system 1 day after making that blog post… go figure!
Fortunately some kind soul (not from Intel) responded to my bug on the Intel forum. It’s actually down to a glitch in the OpenGL spec – to do with the vertex attribute array being ‘aliased’ to index zero on some drivers. So, it is a bug with the Intel HD5000 driver, but one that can seemingly arise anywhere on any graphics card. I’ve addressed it now so the HD5000 uses a different index for tangents, allowing it to render the geometry correctly – but it’s a crappy ‘vendor specific’ fix.
But, now I find the ‘uber-shader’ I have (which again works fine on ATI and nVidia) won’t even compile on the HD5000. Arg!
So – angst ridden questions over the future of Dom arise – given Ao’A – do I bother? It’ll be ages yet before anything tangible comes from the work I’m doing on Dom. Where I might have been at the front of the pack feature and fun wise (even as a lowly small time Indie), now I’m not even in the pack…
And then there’s the potential awesomeness that is Elite Dangerous… the Coriolis Station (Port Zelada) in Alpha 3.0 is just – frankly – awesome to behold. My hat is off to the artists there!
So – right now I’m afraid it’s a bout of wallowing in self-pity and whinge, whinge, whinge…
But… then I think of walking around my vessel as it flies between star systems, or wandering around a space station, or climbing out of my ship onto a mountain top on a deserted planet and watching the sunset with a planetary ring system glowing in the night sky…
Arg!
Closing with some good news… Book 1 – Insurmountable Odds – is nearing completion for it’s a ‘last polish up’ before I throw it at Google Play/iBooks/Kindle and see what happens…
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