Time Flies
I have been working on my demo for more than three weeks now. Time sure does fly! I suppose that means that I have been having a lot of fun. And I have, but time is running out and I can not help but feeling that I should be able to show more for my efforts. There is nothing I can do but put my head down and keep going.

The little virtual world is looking better, and yesterday I had the opportunity of hacking the trees library to fix a limitation it has. We computer programmers love using that verb, by the way. To hack a program or a library means, more or less, that you go into the hundreds, or possibly thousands of lines of code in that piece of software, axe in hand, and find the few lines that are getting in your way. A little chop-chop, hack-hack, and there! It now does what you wanted it to do. You drop your axe right then and there, possibly breaking something very important in the process, and just leave without looking back. If you now passed the software on for others to use it would probably break, crash and burn. But by George, it works for you!

I found the problem while playing with time. In the demo, as in my life, time is now running faster than usual. Let it run for about a little more than a minute and you will see the sun go down, the moon come up and darkness fall over the forest. But trees in the distance refused to change color, holding on to a sun drenched version of themselves. Naughty, naughty trees... But it is all fine now. Take a look it:

At noon

Sunset

Midnight

Instead of adding lakes, which I was planning on doing next, I will have to switch my attention to the virtual creatures of the world. It has been fun playing with the graphics side of this, but without a few entities roaming around and a main character interacting with the world and other beings, this would not be a game demo. And I know just how complicated that part is. You can find dozens of white papers and a lot of research on the web aimed at making little virtual people walk in a believable way. I will have to find a way to do it just well enough for my demo not to look like a worthless exercise in coding. The challenge is on. I am not scared (repeat that 10 times). Here we go!