A semi-important milestone, I suppose. The actual number is 50044, including exporters, lua, maxscript, etc. If you include generated code the figure is nearer 180000. If you include dependencies, the total will be well over half a million…

As we’ve been working on adding procedural object / vegetation support, it has been necessary to revamp the physical material framework within Grit.  This has required changing the grammar of the tcol files, so if you update svn you’ll have to re-export your tcols using the updated maxscripts or they will give you errors inside Grit.  The maxscript is a bit ‘fresh’ but hopefully no serious bugs, if you find anything, please point it out to us on IRC.

Summary of changes:

Materials are now given by string (none of that hex number rubbish anymore) and users can easily add their own materials (see common/phys_mats.lua for examples).  The materials don’t do much yet but they will get fleshed out with various gameplay and behavioural features as time goes by.

The physical materials are now very similar to the graphical materials, they exist (by default) in the directory of the lua file in which they are defined. Tcol files will look in their local directory for physical materials just like mesh files look in their local directory for graphical materials.

Note: When using the tcol maxscript, don’t try and use the GRIT_PHYSMAT material anymore, just assign a normal material with the name you want.

The new system should be a lot more powerful and user-friendly than the old system so any hassle bringing existing tcol files up to date should be worth it.  Thanks!

This screen-shot was digitally enhanced during the down-scaling process. lol.

While our designs are still works in progress, JostVice has worked magic on the game engine forum and I am doing some work here on the site to compliment that.

At this time of writing, I’m feeling like the web page is a little too orange, while the forum just needs some default icons replaced to be brilliant.

Aside from this, there are a couple of forum topics I’d like to point you to. The first is a place to discuss the recent changes to the website and forum and the second is a topic related directly to Grit development: Help us decide the base location of the community game world.

There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes, although we’re not quite ready to spill any beans about the latest advancements to the Grit Game Engine. Join the forum to tell us what you think so far.

UPDATE: You can now select a color preference

Spark is going to stop compiling the .zip releases that can be downloaded from the web. Instead, everyone that wants to be up-to-date should use SVN.

You can check this quick guide to SVN in the forums about setting up SVN to use with Grit. It is intuitive and useful and ensures that everyone can stay up to date at a time where the engine changes so much that releases are a wasteful duty.

There will still be zip releases, but as those are quite slow to do (Changing OS to compile) it will only happen when there is a good bunch of new features to brag about from the SVN.