On the right, you can see a new unit I've been working on - the factory. The graphics are obviously just my crappy programmer art, but it kind of looks a bit factory-like.

But the factory itself is not of concern. The interesting part (and the thing that's taken me the longest to implement!) is the icon you can see on the right.

See, the way it works is that entities which can build things have a builder_component and entities that can be built, have a buildable_component. What happens is that when you select an entity that has a builder_component, the build window (which is the big one on the right) pops up. Then we look at the builder_component's build group and enumerate all entities with buildable_components with the same build group.

In the case of the new factory, it has a build group of "vehicles", so all of the entities with that same build group for their buildable_component (in this case, there's only one for now) get populated.

In the icon for the build button, we display a rendering of the mesh for that entity. When you hover over the button, the entity icon rotates - obviously a screenshot doesn't do it justice, but it's a nice little effect, and it took me a while to get it right :)

So that's it for now. I've actually been a bit sick lately, so I haven't really felt up to doing much work in my spare time, but I should be better now. Fingers crossed!

On the right here you can see the work I've done on the minimap in War Worlds (click for a bigger view). I'm not entirely sure it's exactly the way I like it, but it's pretty close. Here's the features:

1. The centre of the map is where the camera is pointing. As you move around the map, the minimap scrolls. This emphasizes the fact that the world repeats and has no "edges"
2. As you rotate the view, the map rotates as well. That is, "up" on the minimap is always the direction the camera is facing.
3. Units on the map show up as coloured dots on the minimap.

The main thing I'm not so sure about is point #2 above, the main problem with rotating the map is that you lose your sense of direction - there's no "north, south, east, west" if you know what I mean. I could add a little compass or something to provide a direction, but I'm not really sure. I think I'll leave it as-is and let some playtesting figure out whether a compass/direction is even important.

Some other features I've been working on:

1. Entities have the concept of "ownership", and each player has a unique colour assigned  to them when the game starts (you will be able to change your colour in the "New Game" window)
2. Entities are displayed in their colour. This is achieved using the alpha channel in the model's texture. Alpha=1.0 is whatever the texture's colour is, alpha=0.0 is the player's colour
3. I've updated the editor and added some new brushes. The main one is a "levelling" brush which remembers what the height of the terrain was when you left-click and then you can drag that height around. It works really well for creating cliffs and mountains.

Anyway, that's about it for now, I'm sure there'll be more updates in the future!

Apparently, some guy called Cyxymu is saying that the recent attacks on Facebook and Twitter have been because of him.

Now, far be it from me to call him a liar, but the reasons he gives for thinking that they were targeted at him are a little, well, flimsy. In fact, he only gives one reason why he thinks it was him they were targetting:

An attack of such a scale would cost a huge amount of money. This is why I think that some structures in Russia are behind this.

Never mind that a DDoS attack actually doesn't take all that much money to launch (just a lot of computers infected with a virus - a lot of people initially believed the recent attacks on U.S. and South Korean websites were launched by North Korea, for example, a country without a lot of money...), that doesn't actually explain why it was targetting him and not some other high-profile whistle-blower - or just the fact that these are popular sites, and are therefore an attractive target.

It also doesn't explain why he believes the attacks were coming from Russia, when nobody has actually said where they're coming from (that's the whole point of the first "D" in DDoS - the attacks come from all over the place!).

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, they weren't after this Cyxymu guy. They were after me! I don't use Facebook all that much (though my wife does) and I use Twitter only a little bit more, but I have some very strong opinions and a lot of people in high places don't like them!

What opinions? Oh, well, um... let's see... oh! I don't believe it was the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan which won them the war. Yeah, that's controversial enough, I think! That's why people attacked Twitter and Facebook. To silence me!

I've implemented a pretty basic PHPBB single-signon plugin for b2evolution.

Basically, the way it works is when you go to a b2evo page, it looks for the phpbb cookie and if it's there, the cookie contains the user_id of the user you're logged in to phpbb as. So, using the cookie, it looks up your username in the phpbb database, and then it tries to log you on to the b2evo database using the same username. If no user exists in the b2evo database with that username, it creates a new one.

There's probably some tweaking that needs to be done, but so far it seems to be working fairly nicely.

I'm not, at this stage, planning to release my plugin, since it's a bit rough around the edges, but if there's enough demand, I might spend some time to clean it up (and change some of the hard-coded parameters to proper settings and such!)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/08/06/2648024.htm

This video is crazy. What I want to know is, what was the driver of the oncoming vehicle thinking? I thought humans were supposed to be the intelligent species, but this driver doesn't seem to be any smarter than the horse he ran into... dude, the break is on the left!