Pleasantness

As always I end up with all kinds of problems getting a working version of Ember out. I use VMWare Server to host an Ubuntu image on which I build the linux autopackage version. The last week however I've been experienced random kernel panic locks up of my main box. I initially thought it was caused by a faulty SATA chip, but now it seems it's caused by the VMWare network module. Oh well...

All is not bleak however. I've been working with the extremely talented Jayr Kalugin with gettings some more bling into Ember. We've focused on creating some nicer trees, and using more advanced materials with normal maps. I think the initial results are very promising, even thought there's still a lot of work to be done.

Keeping up with the make-it-look-nicer theme I also went over the foliage code. Ever since I changed how the terrain was handled some time ago it's been broken, and I've been reluctant to fixing it since it's basically one big client side hack: it doesn't take into account new areas such as the path to the village, resulting in grass where there should be no grass, and it's not supported on the server. However, it's one of the things that people notice the most, and which I get a lot of questions about. So, in order to present some nice screen shots of the upcoming release I fixed the broken implementation. It looks quite good, but is very resource hungry.