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Bedlam now supports auto-tiling texture projection painting! Load up a chunk of the world data and switch to the paint tool; click away! It just figures out what shapes need to go where so it feels very natural when you’re plopping down clumps of grass and hunks of rock. Very cool stuff.

Additionally, you can see that I’ve refactored the toolbar quite a bit. I’ve removed the need to switch to Orbit, Pan, Zoom and put them on keyboard modifiers because you really do end up doing that a lot more than I thought.

Additionally now that we support painting in a sensible way we’ve added: * A brush size selector. * A brush type picker (only Solid, Noise and Smooth for now.)

Rob and I worked quite a bit on sever I/O and we’ve got realtime deformation in place with persistence at the database. We ended up using the excellent RestSharp API which took a bit of doing to get installed (maybe Rob will do a write-up so others can get the benefit of breaking away from the antiquated WWW/WWWForm classes in Unity.

As part of the process of getting auto tiling working for textures, I was able to implement a much leaner method of storing the texture information so we’ll be looking at packed texture descriptions on the order of 6 times smaller than before. That should mean that we can store thousands of unique textures in just a couple of megabytes worth of game download.

I’ve done a ton of work on tuning the database to perform well but honestly I think we’ve kind of outpaced a single-instance MySQL server. Right now we’re loading chunk-sets (around 4k nodes per query) in 0.03 seconds but transmission time and other factors mean we only load chunks in around 10 frames per second. It would be great to get those figures down further but unless I get a lot more intelligent about InnoDB I think we’re stuck. I really don’t want to refactor for Mongo or Redis but that might have to be the way it goes.

If you’re interested in getting more timely information we’re going to be using the Forums more and more over the next few weeks. We’ve set up the excellent NodeBB and you can use your Steam or Facebook account to log in.

Sorry for the long post but hopefully these details make up for the fact that I was pretty much vacant this week. Cheers!