Progress: hosting, lightmapping, rocking and grading

It's been another really good week for the Wander team. We made some great progress with level design and rock placement, HUD / UI art, terrain textures, lighting, hosting and more. We also got one of the most difficult bits of the coding done, and you can now see when another player picks a flower, that the flower disappears. Many of the team are quite tired today though after Melbourne hosted the amazing White Night festival last night.

We've started setting up a few more servers ready for the start of alpha testing. We're using Microsoft Azure and some dedicated hardware for the servers. Azure so far seems amazingly painless to use. I've set up Amazon EC2 a number of times before and found it quite fiddly. Getting things going with Azure was quick! There is still a few more things  to work out before we've got all that done but it's good to have made some progress.

Thursday was a day of things breaking, when the version control system we were using decided not to work. I suspect the problem would have been fixable but the benefits it was bringing were too small for the amount of additional effort to use it. We've now swapped from Plastic SCM to a combination of AeroFS and Git. Hopefully this will be more straight forward for us.

We've got some big plans for this week and as soon as we've got the tropical planet light mapped we will be releasing some more pretty screenshots.