XNA Procedural Trees are now hosted at CodePlex.

www.CodePlex.com/XNATrees







The procedural trees I wrote for Irrlicht can now be used in XNA as well. Based on the tree generator for Irrlicht, this produces very similar trees, but since XNA has no scene graph, I had to structure the code quite a bit differently. I am happy with the outcome, though. See the XNA Procedural Trees page for the download. Now, I wish I knew an XNA community site where I could post it, but I\'m stumped.



What happened to Irrlicht? It is easy to use, but until it starts showing some progress again I'm hanging out with XNA. I don't like being stuck with C# (eugh..), so I hope I can return to an engine using unmanaged code at some point.



I finally decided to the release the GUI I wrote for Irrlicht quite a while back. I originally wrote it for a small project, but decided that this was probably worth releasing on its own (unlike the rest of the project). It find it slightly prettier than Irrlicht's native skin, which looks like somewhat like windows 3.1, but I'm not much of an artist so the texture-work is a bit sloppy. It should be fairly easy to replace the textures with something better, though. To download it see the new Klasker's GUI page.



On a side note in regarding my previous newspost, I did install Windows XP again. I still like GNU/Linux, but its current support for 3D graphics did not meet my needs for games and 3D graphics. And surprisingly, XP seems to have fewer bugs than Ubuntu, albeit consuming a colossal amount of resources in comparison. I gave windows a 12 GB partition thinking it would be enough, if I kept all my files and programs on the 80 GB partition. I was wrong. You'd be surprised how many programs insist on unload a truckload of garbage on drive C: after I told it to install at drive E:. The cumulative amount of "mysterious garbage" piling up on my C-drive is approaching 10 GB, leaving me with only 1 GB free. Linux is a lot better at file management. And while I'm ranting why not mention that e107 puts a backslash in front of every apostrophe when I click "Preview". Grr..

And by the way, today my summer holidays officially began, as I finished my last exam of the semester today. Lots of time for spare-time projects I guess :)



A small update to the Procedural Trees, now at version 2.1.

New in v 2.1

• Optimized the leaf billboards. Great performance boost in forests.
  
• Refactored the code to allow many trees to share the same set of leaves. Previously only the mesh could be shared.
  
• Fixed a bug that would hide the leaves near the transition to the billboard LOD.

I finally finished the new version of my procedural trees. The code has been completely rewritten (again) and it is now a lot better than before. In particular, there are only 6 files now to include now (3 headers and 3 sources). Tree designs are loaded from XML files now, the old ITreeProfile API was terribly cumbersome to work with. It still takes work to create a decent tree design, especially making the leaf textures, but it is a lot better. An experienced coder can probably learn the format by looking at the four tree designs I included, but I'll post a description of the markup language, and I don't mean a DTD or XML Schema, I mean a human readable and understandable tutorial for making a simple tree design.

But let's see some screenshots!



Man this is so much better than last time. Head over to the Procedural Trees page to download and view the list of features.



My new portfolio has been created. It is prettier than the old one, thanks to the excellent design of e107. Heh heh, programmer's art does not make for a good page design. It should also be more convenient for me to add new new projects to the site from now on.