May 13, 2008, 7:20 PM: My First Successful Build of TW2

Well, ok, I don’t actually know when the build happened, I found that time in a timestamp in the Targetware log today when trying to remember what day I got it to build for the first time:

080513 19:20:55 2.0.569

I’m guessing the build would have finished oh, say, 3 seconds before the time in that log. I’d never used xcode before, but Wade had it set up nicely for me, all I really had to do, once I had all the right files, was to hit the build button and wait. Normally, most apps only use one of the 2 cores in my CPU. xcode made both little bars go up to 100%. Yeah for something truly multi-threaded! (I still think multi-core CPUs are a pathetic, and short-term direction for computing to have taken). Since it had gotten to about 95% done the night before, and then failed, I didn’t actually think it would go, but this time, it finished with no errors. There was the little round Targetware logo on my intel iMac. Double-click time.

Not that it actually started up the first time, mind you. But the log was there, and a couple commented out lua lines later, it started up, loaded sick’s test UI and test “campaign” (and by campaign, I mean a world and solar system populated by a single 3D object). I looked around, saw some mountains or hills, some valleys, and in the distance, some water. Looked up, saw the sun, with a nice, err, sun effect going on. Saw some stars. Saw the moon low on the horizon. Joy.

Doing a Little Exploring in the New World

Not having much in the way of instructions, I just started plinked around on the keyboard until I found most of the controls (“-” and “=” being 2 I didn’t find right away: – slows down rate of movement, = speeds you up… very handy when you want to move out of the solar system and check out some other stars), and then started checking out the new terrain engine. As I mentioned, I didn’t know how to speed up, so it took me a while to figure out I was in Southern California. Once I got to some pretty high alt, I could see the Baja Peninsula. But before that, I was down by the water checking out the waves. Yeah, waves. They move. They have height. They reflect sunlight (if you’re at the right angle to the sun). And no, I can’t take a pic. Well I could, but you wouldn’t think it was anything special. Sick showed me a couple screenshots a week or so before, and I thought (Don’t kill me sick!): “huh. That’s, umm, nice.” But when you’re down on the waves, at 0 alt, and you see them doing wierd-old wavy stuff (hey, I’m from the great plains, our waves are on lakes, and they only go one direction), well, it’s just pretty damn cool. 

I had No Idea the Moon was so Far Away

So after I finally figured out how to zoom faster (ok, Sick told me how), I went out exploring a bit. You know, zoom over some mountains, that kind of thing. Except I zoomed into space. Looking down, I can see the entire Pacific Coastline, and a good chunk of North America actually. The world curves around, and it’s really dark outside now. The Sun looks different from here. I zoom down again, it’s pretty smooth. Zoom up again. Where’s that Moon thing? Can’t find it. Ask sick, he assures me it’s there. Finally, after circling around the planet a bit, I see this grey thing out, far out. Just a little gray thing. I head over to it, and damned if it’s not the moon. I mean, it’s THE moon. Just like the pictures. I always thought it was a lot closer to Earth. When you get out there, and look back, the Earth is just a little blue ball. Makes me appreciate, more than I ever did before, how incredible those Apollo missions were.

How Terrain Works in TW2

Let me be honest: I don’t fully know yet. This reminds me of the old, old days when it was like TW 0.31 or something, and I was just trying to figure out how things worked. Apparently, it’s pretty easy to build a new terrain. Wade just let me know that I should be able to build the “tool” tool with xcode now, so I’ll build that in a bit and let you know how it goes. From talking to Sick, it seems like tool does a lot of heavy lifting for you now. It downloads the geo data, etc., for the coordinates you give it. I’ll have a separate post on that soon. 

From looking at the terrain in game, I would hazard an edumacated guess, and say that it knows about the solar system (ok, I know it does, I looked at the lua loader for that), and it has a rough texture for the entire Earth. If you have loaded a detailed terrain, it will show that in varying degrees of resolution, the closer you get to it. I took a snap that shows, on my iMac anyway, the difference between generic Earth terrain, and a detailed terrain (in the TW1 sense):

Ok, off to see if Tool will build tonight, and get started on a TR terrain.