November Plus

After I shut down the fantasy Kickstarter pipe-dream. I went back to development again. Among last month’s achievements:

• solid and linear gradient brush definitions (for mapping and models)
• composite models from model fragments and brushes
• limited addition of some Helix Toolkit features
• single axis sloping cell space (and other changes to support sloped surfaces in land movement)

Basically, the latest development build of the workshop now has the ability to define solid and linear gradient brushes. These can be used in brush-sets for cell tiling, as named brush-keys for models, and as for mapping brush references to brushes in composite models.

In addition to changes to the base Model object (for characters and objects) to support brushes directly in the serialized package (as opposed to merely indirectly through images), a new derived MetaModel class has been defined that allows model fragments to be joined and spatially transformed in a conglomerating network of parts. In addition, brushes can be mapped to the parts through another layer of indirection and fallback name resolution.

I have also added some mesh generating MarkupExtensions for cylinders, cones, and trimmings of other meshes, based on Helix Toolkit code. Also, several of the previewer controls (most notably the model preview) use a Helix Viewport for fluid zooming, rotating and panning.

And most recently, I just finished the world-emulation, server-side bindings and workshop editing for single axis sloping cells (where the slope runs along a single axis). I also came up with a polygon generation strategy for linear-planar collisions to more uniformly determine when a line is blocked by a cell. There is still dual-axis slopes to (eventually) do, but I am more focused on tubular cells (such as pillars and “chutes”).