I have updated My Name is Poncho with a new Village scene. The scene is very complex and was meant to be a stress test for the engine. I don’t expect it to run smooth on any machine: there are lots of doors, windows and shadows.

Also the new zSort algorythm is slow when the scenes have this level of complexity: sorting all planes in 3D becomes a non-trivial operation that involves lots of calculations. I plan to work on optimizing it or at least provide a way to include the sort result into the scene’s XML so it doesn’t have to be recalculated every time you load it. But at least it works now.

Here’s a list of the engine’s changes that are shown in this demo. They are not available as a release, but you can always checkout the latest sources via SVN.

Changelog

• Added the fMaterialTypes class, where you can find info on the available materials and how to use them
• Added the “fence” material
• New zSort algorythm. It is cleaner and faster (it really is, but this particular demo is very tricky to sort), and I hope this one will work properly.
• Added the “xmlObj” property to elements
• Added the “window” material.
• Added the “animated” property to fObjects, which allows some optimization.
• Added the fHole class, which gives control over holes in fPlanes. Now holes can be opened and closed.
• Added a Building Generator
• Moved generators to new package “helpful” outside the engine, as they really do not belong there. Thnx to Jason Booth for the wisdom.
• Sprite hierarchy is properly setup so you can add Mouse Events to fElements and the appropiate element receives the event.
• Materials now tile seamlessly along adjacent surfaces.
• Fixed: The engine now assigns an internal unique ID to each element, and uses that id in internal hashtables instead of relying on the IDs you assign. This was causing lots of trouble.
• Fixed: “BOX Tag” from generators were ignored
• Fixed: Exception caused by shadow projection trying to calculate intersection between paralel lines.
• Fixed: Several shadow projection bugs