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For the last 1-2 weeks the forums have been really slow and unresponsive for me, when I type a post half the time it just sits there etc.. is anyone else having the same issues..?

Does anybody else have this problem? In the (European) evenings the forum is unbearable slow. The server is delivering about 8Kbyte/s, sometimes less and usually stops midwhere during loading the page. Sometimes you can't even get the index page, sometimes you can log in, but then only get half of the overview etc. In the mornings everything is snappy.

I've just been thinking of some animated stuff lately as we haven't really got anywhere with this yet. (nothing finalized) I know we've discussed quite a bit but I thought I'd update what the best options seem to be/ what we still need to accomplish. Sorry if it's a slight regurge. --MODELS-- I've finally come around to believing that seperate objects really is the best way to make animated objects for the most part. However I've decided that it needs to be a combination of static and animated meshes as opposed to a bunch of seperate static meshes. Here's what I'm thinking. Say we have a machine. On one side it has a single gear rotating. This is easy enough to use 2 objects. machine and gear and set a script to rotate gear. But what if this machine has 3 gears one side and 5 on the other? 9 objects? too much. So having a machine and an animated gear set that matches is the way to go. The benefit of this is using a prefab to unite them as one entity for the author to place. This could go 2 ways. 1-The static mesh machine itself could have a collision box that encompasses the gears (on objects where animated objects stay in relatively the same spot) That would be slightly generic as you could place something on collision box and it wouldn't move with gear. But easy. 2-We have an AF for the gears. (at least this way the whole machine doesn't need af model, collision mesh will be used and more accurate) This would mean the grandfather clock would have 2 animated texture faces for the moving hands. It would be an entity with an attached animated pendulum. In this simple case maybe the pendulum should indeed just be a static scripted obj. (to my dismay, I really wanted easily animated working objs, oh well, you guys were right ) Vegetation. Alot of the plants, flowers, ect can be animated. The player won't collide but that's OK. So we can make them sway in the wind. I'm a little leary that using animated textures would give a good result for this. One thing I have found though when animating Springheels bush (I will finish and upload soon) is that the material string twosided does NOT work with an Md5 animation. So any of these plants WILL have twice as many polys as the non-animated ones. Should be fine as they aren't really high poly anyway and the renderer handles them fine. @Spring... I'd like to see an animated bush using the texture technique, I should be able to upload the animated bush this weekend, I'd like to do a side by side so everyone can voice opinions on which way we should go. --TEXTURES-- I'm still a little in the dark on how to animate textures. I kindof suck at all the material files, scripting ect anyway... I know we can rotate a texture on its polygons. Can we translate it across the polys? And make it tile so if we made a conveyor belt the tex would slide 'off' one side and at the same time slide 'onto' the other? What other options can we do with animated tex? Knowing this will help determine future models and how they are made. -- A little something to chew on...

I've upgraded IPB to the latest stable version, and since this was a major upgrade (from 2.3.6) I also had to re-do the forum style. Most of the new stuff is in place, but I bet that the logo will be changed. One of the many new features in version 3 is rating of posts and also a "report spammer" ability which will make it easier to single out spam bots and ban then at sight. Hopefully this will stop some of the spam threads we've seen recently. Make sure to empty your browser cache if you're experiencing any problems. And please report any errors etc in this thread. Cheers, ~m2

So... What was up with the forums all day yesterday..?

I've reorganised the brushexport plugin into a module and I'm running into a crash when this is called: BrushInstance* bptr = InstanceTypeCast<BrushInstance>::cast(instance); This should convert a general instance into a BrushInstance, but it crashes for some reason. Apart from this everything is in place, the module gets loaded correctly and I can successfully draw a brush and call the option from the menu. I can even select the file from the GTK dialog and as soon as the visitor class starts traversing the scene, it bails out. I'm working on it (slowly, because the std::cout debugs are tedious and compile times increase as I reach the deeper include files with lots of dependencies), just wanted to post my progress here.