Exporting and importing in Ember

The last couple of weeks I've been working on improved authoring capabilities in Ember and Cyphesis. One of the most important features is the ability to both export and import entities from and into servers.

This allows a world author to save a snapshot of the world to local disk, and later on restoring the world as it was in the snapshot. There are multiple usage scenarios, but one that immediately springs to my mind is the improved ability to perform iterative world editing. By being able to reset the world back to a known working state it's much easier to try out new configurations and behaviour.

All work is currently being done on separate branches of both Ember and Cyphesis. The following video shows the status of this feature some weeks ago; it has progressed even more since.

Worldforge in Google Summer of Code 2012

We've been allowed to take part in Google Summer of Code for another year. This is as always exciting and humbling. The Summer of Code is such a wonderful program which always keeps us amazed. So many different things are awesome, from the basic ideas and soul of the program, to the people at Google making it happen, to the mentors around the world, to the students working all through summer.

There's an announcement up on the main Worldforge site with more information.  Right now we're in the period where students are encouraged to interact with the community and work on their ideas.

If working on a totally free virtual world system during the summer sounds interesting, don't hesitate: run over to the Worldforge wiki, read up on the program and don't be shy about applying.

Properly shaded foliage

Ember has a system for generating grass and other kind of foliage. It looks pretty good in most cases, but the shading of the grass has always been off. This is even more apparent when the time of day changes, as the grass doesn't change colour when the world does. In addition, the grass didn't receive any shadows, making it look strange when running in a higher graphics settings.

All this has changed now however, as I've altered the grass to be both properly lit and to receive shadows correctly. The effect can be seen below.