Author: Marco Kalf

We couldn´t idle around between Christmas and New Year eventhough we said that we do and held a little three days long Developer Meeting.

Overall we decided which objectives we want to follow respectively which tasks are to be done. Furthermore, we have planned out most of the future components of the game so they only wait for their implementation.

Of course we weren´t only planning but rather developed further for Kompex. Since we could finish many of our open tasks and now have a clear view about our unfinished tasks we can already say that we don´t miss much for our next release. :D

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Author: Marco Kalf

The whole Kompex-Team wishes all of you a merry christmas, a diligent Santa and of course nice christmas holidays. Enjoy the thoughtful times. :)

In addition we already wish you a happy new year. The Kompex-Team will be on a little winter break and will continue working in January. Meanwhile you can look forward to our News in the upcoming Year.

Well - We hope to see/hear you guys next year.

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Author: Marco Kalf

Today a new version of our SQLite Wrapper has been released.

For the main part version 1.7.9 of the Kompex SQLite Wrapper contains one important bugfix. It solves an error which made databases, which used the AUTOINCREMENT keyword, not being able to transfer between the hard-drive and your internal memory.

In addition it now uses the recent version 3.7.9 of SQLite, thus adding more stability, performance and security.

All information regarding the Kompex SQLite Wrapper and the possibility to download can be found on its project website: http://sqlitewrapper.kompex-online.com

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Author: Marco Kalf

Over a year ago we came to the conclusion that we need our own terrain system because the one shipped with Ogre3D just didn´t fit our needs. One of our major problems was that we could only use 5 textures on the whole 2048 x 2048 units terrain. Furthermore, we wanted to get the best performance possible for our task.

After a research about current techniques regarding terrain systems we decided to implement GPU Clipmaps. The crucial reason behind that was that most of the operations are handled soley by the Graphics Processing Unit(GPU). Since the GPU handles tasks related too such instructions faster then the CPU it should give our terrain a good performance boost.

The first important step was porting a pure DirectX Demo and getting it to work with Ogre3D. Since our knowledge about graphics programming was rather limited many weird bugs found their way to the surface.

The first screenshot shows our humble beginnings where the terrain data wasn´t visualized correctly.



However in the second screenshot we can actually see the terrain, unfortunately with obvious gaps though.



After countless hours of work and bugfixes it finally was in a state that everything worked as intended. Out next step was to find a technique to have more then five textures on one terrain.
In the end we found a solution to fit more then 256 different textures.
Further details will follow in a later news.

Once the terrain was functional we only had to clean up the source code because it was a really mess. ;) There is also the possibility to use the new terrain in our level editor by now.

Therefore, our new terrain system is not very far from having an initial release.

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Author: Marco Kalf

Many of our outsourced services will move to our own vServer and since our server applications and their associated services are getting more demanding on ressources, we got ourselves a new and above all faster Server.

The old vServer will be shutdown on the 31.10.2011. Since our Kompex related server applications are running on it on it, it will not be possible to test the client starting from this date.
We hope that in the meantime the screenshots will be sufficent.

Meanwhile we are working hard on the next Kompex version. Only god knows when it will be out, but be assured that you will be able to test it again when it comes out.

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