Had a bit of a bad time with my chosen Lua binding lib LuaPlus recently - it seems I can't trap any meaningful error output when calling Lua functions from C++. This makes development a nightmare, and almost impossible for 3rd parties to write mods. Plus it looks like no-one uses LuaPlus any more as it's too old/unsupported, so I may have to migrate to a different solution there :(
Added level-of-detail facilities to the model & rendering system. Not essential at the moment, but will be once the world/model detail ramps up, and I want to increase the island mesh resolution and size too at some point (bigger, more detailed islands :)).
Model meshes tagged in Blender as a LOD level are auto-extracted and used when rendering at a distance.
Also added support for specifying mesh 'render flags' in the modeller: i.e. setting polygons to be two-sided, alpha-tested and unlit.
To test both of these new additions I added the first vegetation to the world - a nice fir tree in keeping with the original's unusual planting scheme.
Ah refactorisation. The structure hierarchy has had yet another revamp, and this time I'm happy with it at last! I'd strayed from the path a bit regarding the cells as a different class, so now it's back in the heirarchy deriving from a Structure and all is well. Now the basic objects/structures in the world are fully recursive, so I could build a cell base, build a structure on it, and build a defense turret on that, etc. The individual cells are like mini ACCB's and build their own supporting structures at the site. All these spawn/build instructions and the ACCB deployment have been moved over to lua so are fully customisable.
Work has been done on the structure placement process too, as it was simply some basic suitability checks on land height/slope. Now I need to evaluate a 'placement score' for a given position, maybe relaxing the score requirements after some searching so we can guarantee that essential structures always get placed somewhere. Might have to alter the island geometry in real-time to ensure gameplay requirements are met though - will have to see how it goes.
So yes, gameplay progression has been somewhat stalled, but hope to get back on track...