OH MY FLIPPING GOD!
nuff said
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I have been making lots of progress within the last months. I have been switchting a lot between multiple construction sites within the NL2 code which is over 400,000 lines so far. That's already more than the lines of all NL1.x modules counted together. Not every feature I started working on is completely finished at this point, so I cannot present anything brand new. Instead I decided to create a small video showing some features I have already talked about earlier. The video is encoded using Ogg Theora. If you use Firefox 3.5 or newer you can directly watch the video, otherwise you may need VLC or any other video player that can play Theora files..
http://www.nolimitscoaster.de/NL2_2009_07_22.ogg Walkmode Video (Ogg Theora)
The video basically shows the built-in walkmode. Unfortunately the coaster you can see in this video is a 3ds scene object. The coaster designing code is almost finished, but the object creation is not, so the 3ds file is still used as a place holder at this point. The final coasters in NL2 will look much better than this simple 3ds. I do not know if I talked about the walkmode yet. It was one of the first things I implemented in NL2, so I am considering it as an old new feature. It works quite nicely, you can walk on all kinds of objects that are meant for walking on, including scene objects. The video also shows some auto-plants, if you look carefully you can see that the plants are moving slightly. New ambient sounds and the dynamic shadows give a much higher immersion effect than NL1.
I am right now working on a built-in Force Vector Design Tool, that will allow you to create tracks specified by g-force values. I already implemented a built-in Elementary that allows to create elements based on formulas. The syntax is quite identical to Tia's original Elementary tool, so the existing collection of formulas can be reused with small modifications. [ol]