So, I guess this is a few days late or something like that. We’re lazy, we’re slow, you’re bored, and so on and so on is all I’ve been hearing these past few weeks – well I guess it’s time for an update then, to silence the masses. Click on ‘Read More’ below to take a look at what we’ve got to say and to learn of The Curse of Prometheus.

The Curse of Prometheus

Yes, you read that right, our project and all people related to it are cursed. Actually, people who have nothing to do with our project are cursed as a result of it, but more on that later. How do I know the project is cursed you ask? Well, it’s quite obvious actually; let me break down the past two months of events that have happened to the team. You can, of course, click the images for a better view of the destruction!

Two car accidents

Two neck injuries

Two back injuries

Eye surgery

Broken leg

Three hard drive crashes

Five crushed fingers with three that don’t move

One Act of God

So as you can see, Prometheus is actually cursed for reasons unknown. Kornman spent some time in Florida recently and during the time he was down there hurricane Dennis spawned and came speeding towards him – as you can see the Prometheus Curse has nation-wide effects in the United States. As for all the others, they’re shared between the members of the team and all of those incidents have really occurred within the past two months in our lives.

Now that you know how cursed we are, you might be able to understand the lack of pretty things to take pictures of and give updates on. Never-the-less, in times of great hazard and danger to ourselves we have carried on and Grenadiac has written up most of our progress since the last update … but we’ll get to that later. First, I would like to take a moment to remind everybody of something very important and as a prelude to that I would like you to click the three images below.

Above you see the Eiffel Tower, Petronas Towers, and the Sears Tower. So, what’s up with the tower theme? Well, that was an accident really, but the point of the before and after pictures is simple. Creating a program is like making a building: you have to build the ugly foundation before you can put the pretty shiny things on the outside of it. It takes a great deal of work to do both the ugly underbelly and the pretty exterior when making almost anything and Prometheus is no different.

We are a work in progress and as such every span of work we do may not result in changes you can see with your eyes but rather are changes that can only be noticed when using Prometheus. Increasing stability, speed, and reliability are just as important as making cool features you see in screenshots and videos and sometimes people seem to forget that. It should be noted that there are a few features we have close to working that you can visually see, but they aren’t quite ready to be shown yet.

And now I turn this update over to Grenadiac.

The Belly of the Beast

The code we are working on may not be supermodel-sexy and involve pretty screenshots, but it is the infrastructure that holds the gurgling beast together. So without further procrastination (like we need any more of that), here's a description of what we've been working on.

First, I overhauled the archive system that the decompiler extracts tags to. When a map is decompiled, its tags go into a single file archive which will help increase speed during compilation. We used a nice FREE open source library at first, but it was a complete piece of %$#^% and had to be completely redone with a new $$$ library. The new system works much better and doesn't corrupt our tags all of the time, which is a nice feature to have. It's all good because Nick is donating blood to pay for it, right Nick? [Editor's Note: They've begun turning me away at the blood bank even though my blood type is the rarest in the world.]

Related to the archive is the "Tag Explorer", which you may have seen in some of our screenshots. No, it isn't a tiny version of Magellan that examines your hard drive for thousands of little Halo files. Hrm...wait...maybe it is. Anyway, it involves a tree control that allows you to browse tags and add them to your project. MonoxideC added a right-click menu that allows you to preview certain tags, add a tag to your project, and some other things that we are still working on. We are still coding support for the various functions, but it is coming together nicely.

Then Mono and I fought over a complete redesign of the model system we are using. I wanted to stick with our current design, and MonoxideC felt we should overhaul it and make the model handling more generic for future expansion. It was a battle of miniscule proportions! We fought for days using harsh language (not really) and the occasional valid argument, but then Mono used a crowbar on me, and we decided to redo everything. Well, most of that is done now and I must say it was a good choice. Unfortunately, it also means we broke some animation and Halo2 support, so those problems are still being de-dork-ified. On a better note though, I finished implementing a distance-based LOD so that Prometheus draws lower-polygons models if the model is farther away from the camera, and high resolution models when it is closer.

Another item we crossed off of our list is the Object selection support. While it may sound fairly simple to click on an object on your screen and have the computer know that you actually did click on it, in practice it is actually quite a bit of work. Since we were using our own custom meshes, we couldn't use the built-in DirectX support for this, so I had to write it myself. Anyways, it involved lots of math and coordinate systems and thinking and stuff, but it actually does work now. I'm not sure why. W00t!

Finally, the horrifying camera action you may have seen in previous videos has been completely overhauled. The new camera is less horrifying. It is less annoying. It no longer causes fits of vomiting and convulsions. In fact, it is quite nice. It uses things like quaternions and running average buffers, which sound very fancy, but all that matters is that it's like butter. Not that crap that Fabio sold before he was hit in the face with a duck. Real butter.

Since the drama that was the spring from hell, ViperNeo has apparently overhauled the de/compiler system with a totally new design (using his non-gimp hand, one keystroke at a time). It kicks some serious ass, and we are now in the process of integrating it into the main code base. The cool thing about this new code is that it uses a much cleaner design than before, so it runs quite a bit faster. The bad thing about the code is that it changed a couple of the tag formats, so it broke some of the rendering loaders. Such is life. Tra la la. [As a side note, the real reason Viper has been gone for so long is because he could barely type with one good hand, even now he needs assistance logging into IRC from a nurse - OMG j/k Capt. Hook … I mean Viper, settle down!].

As for Kornman00, once his computer disaster recovers, we should have some nice surprises in store that may actually involve...gasp...a new screenshot. He is currently on vacation somewhere in Florida (enjoying the aftermath of Dennis and the lovely possibility of any additional acts of God). Some pretty cool stuff should be coming along soon, so stay tuned.

Well there you go, Grenadiac gave you the low down on what’s been happening for the past two months and you can be sure that you won’t have to wait that long for an update ever again (hopefully).