It looks like you have successfully compiled it, and successfully got it to find your glest data.
What you see on the screen is whatever graphics test code - view frustum culling code to be precise - that I happened to be testing last time I commited to the repo. so nothing pretty right now, sorry.
Pressing the 'm' key will let you click around in the xml editing code that's being prototyped.
at a time when we are so happy to hear of MG and GAE strains converging, it seems odd to be making a new fork. but what's a fork without three prongs? cool.
fork is not an accurate term? This is a new project. It just happens to strive for at least basic data compatibility with VG/GAE/MG.
how does the 'virtual' grid work for buildings? how easy is it to auto-align buildings?
A good question. The code is nowhere near there yet, but my thought is this:
Buildings can be placed arbitrarily anywhere on the surface. Now the surface is naturally slightly convex - its flat if all corners of of the faces of the mesh you are placing the building on have the same distance from the centre of the planet.
The planet generating code will have to ensure there is plenty of flat land, or perhaps the engine supports terraforming. Terraforming obviously has to be supported as a modding tool, so that you can generate a random planet and then terraform it to suite a scenario, and then save it and that saved game becomes the basis for a map or scenario. But terraforming in-game as part of the game? Reminds me of Populous. I could imagine that the land around a building placement be auto-flattened if its within some tolerance of level perhaps.
The alignment is a trickier problem still. I particularly don't want an up and down and a grid, but within the locality of a settlement that makes sense - at least in glest compatibility mode. So when you place a building you have free rotate. And when you place a building near another building, it auto-rotates to align (rather like snapping in powerpoint prehaps) but you can overrule that.
Navigating on a globe is a fun problem. The engine will have to remember the camera you last viewed each distinct settlement at, and allow you to tab through all your settlements (and other points of note such as ongoing battles or wandering scouts) and show each in an appropriate orientation, otherwise you'll not recognise anything
Ideas on this front most welcome.
When we use the same engine to load classic Glest maps, all these decisions are eased, but we already have engines that can do that...
Edit by Omega: Merged double posts