Today I did some interesting work with SVG. I have an idea to use librsvg with libart and libxml2 to create a system that renders SVG efficiently on certain platforms for procedural rendering. I have a bunch of projects that seem to require SVG, so I'm glad to have made some progress on it today. It's a rather premature plan, so I won't recount my chickens for you. I'll simply tell you what I found today.
The other day I was talking about a dynamic sky system. It would act like the sky by changing its properties as the day goes by. I tried importing the simple sky system I had the other day into AS3D. It's still buggy, but you can see below that it did actually happen. I'm no longer using the crutch of setting the background color.
Automation is an interesting thing. Some things are just easier and faster done manually. Other things are easier and faster done by a computer. The science of discovering which really is better is left up to common sense. Sadly, common sense is commonly uncommon*. That's where today's design system comes from. I decided during a research session on Seattle buildings' architecture that automation of building design in Cell would be wasteful and that I could simply design buildings using very simple architecture techniques that I found during my research.
* If you get my cliche, laugh, it's not meant to be insightful.
A modest attempt at development on AltSci Cell can be viewed below. Months now with very little progress is disappointing, but I suppose I'll continue on. A rant about how easy laziness is would probably not advance progress any better than the past rants, so I'll spare you.
Today, I came up with a few ideas on the way to and from Uwajimaya Asian market. The first is that the sky has a quantifiable set of properties even though it is very complex and interesting in reality. But complete quantification of every meteorological property of the sky is not my plan. I want a fairly reasonable dynamic sky so that the player is not faced with 24 hours of daylight and something to break up the blue sky and black night. Adding a sunrise and sunset is not the only thing that a developer can do. Adding a gradient to the sky also helps. Artists will tell you that the sky has a white part near the horizon. Some days the sky is very deep blue, some days it is very light blue. How can we decide? First lighten and darken the sky randomly by day. Secondly, use the time of day to decide the deepness of the color. The next thing is clouds. It's obvious that the sky will have clouds in it some days. How do you properly add clouds? One way is by adding the clouds to the texture. Another way is by having a transparent layer with different types of clouds. This way if you really want to have fun, you can make moving clouds. Of course you can make textured clouds move, but it might require extra work. The final thing is stars. Of course, it's easy to add stars to a sky, right? Well, you are going to have a bit of trouble depending on your choice of UV coordinates or if your sky is a box. It's possible to do it correctly, it's just a matter of work.
