Long time no updates on this site. The last weeks were quite stressfull and I have been busy doing various things here and there. Every so often I got distracted from my work on NL2, by either contract jobs for coaster companies or hardware problems with my PC. For the last three months I was not able to finish anything I started working on, so I decided to interrupt the monthly NL2 news because of lack of news to report. Now things are getting more clearly and I do actually have something to report by now.
First of all there is a new update for the Mac version called 1.72. This is a minor update which fixes a bug with the static shadows on Intel Macs, I therefore recommend this update to all users with Intel Macs. Users with PowerPC equipped Macs do not need this update. Also the full and demo releases for Macs are now based on 1.72. Please go to Update 1.72 for MacOS X to download the update.
I am almost done with the hand-building track designing code in NL2. My progress on NL2 development is not far enough yet, to be able to fully judge within NL2 how good the quality of my hand-built tracks in terms of smoothness are. In order to be able to improve the track building features at this point, I quickly tossed together some sort of track export, which allows me to test ride my NL2 tracks within NL1. I am quite satisfied with the results, The NL2 hand-built tracks indeed turned out to be much smoother compared to hand-built tracks in NL1 within the same amount of time. Though there is still room left for improvement, but everything turned out how I expected it. I am experimenting with some advanced auto-smoother algorithms right now that will further improve the quality of the hand-built tracks.
On a different construction site, I managed to get tunnels through terrain working. This is a feature requested very frequently and I can now confirm that this feature will definitely be available in NL2. Right now my solution does not work in real-time, I am still trying to get my algorithm working faster, but hey at least it works. Cutting out the portions that do intersect with the tunnels turned out to be not trivial, at least for me, which is why I never added that feature to NL1. I will keep you informed about more progress I make on this topic and will hopefully be able to update this site more frequently in the future. [ol]
