Well it's been a while and Ole has been keeping us on the edge of our seats waiting for the update but at long last here it is.
Happy Holidays!
The NL team wishes Happy Holidays to all NoLimits users. The team is back from our meeting, we had some great days in the United States. Among some amusement park visits on the west coast we went to the IAAPA trade show. I wished I could have stayed longer. Vegas is a fun place and the convention was definitely worth it. It was nice to visit the booths of various manufacturers and check out their new inventions.
I am quite excited about working on NL2 right now. I reached a point where a lot of the groundwork I spent lots of time on finally pays off. If I continue working hard like I do right now and if avoid too many interruptions, NL2 will be finished in late 2010. I lately finished most of the background and environment. The terrain on the background shown on the screenshot above is fully 3d and generated automatically. It is based on a couple of fractal parameters and textures. Its setup is included into the environment and can be customized with a simple environment editor inside NL2. Playing around with the fractal parameters is fun, users will be able to quickly change the appearance of the background terrain with a couple of edits. Also scene objects can be included into the environment. I added a couple of wind energy stations that can be seen on the screenshot. Thanks to Buster for all the models. The snow particle effect is new, too. The snow intensity can be changed inside the simulator at run time using a simple weather panel. I got influenced by the movie The Truman Show. If you have seen the movie, you might remember a console they used to changed the weather. The weather panel looks and works very similar in the NL2 sim. Right now I am back working on the rendering of the new track. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to show a decent screenshot of the new textured rails before Christmas. A lot of the textures and models are only of temporary nature and need to be replaced by better ones later. I am looking forward to show some new steel coaster track with textures in early 2010 which will look much better than in NL1.x.
[ol]