Sale on PlumeriaSC 2

We have just lowered the price of Plumeria Smart Charts 2 to $2.99USD. Also, PlumeriaSC 2 has an Apple educator's discount of 50% off the $2.99USD price. More updates for PlumeriaSC 2 will be coming soon.

PlumeriaSC 2 v1.0 Released

The much anticipated release of Plumeria Smart Charts 2 has come. For a list of features and to watch the release video go to the Solar Fusion Software website. The video includes pictures of the chalkboard flow charts and a Stunt Kite game created on the iPad. One of the really cool features is that the tutorials in PlumeriaSC 2 teach you to create your very own Stunt Kite game entirely on an iPad. You can buy and download PlumeriaSC 2 from iTunes.

Tutorials and VBAs

We are still working hard to get PlumeriaSC 2 ready as soon as possible. The latest thing I have been working on is the tutorials. I have programmed PlumeriaSC 2 to follow my selections and then use an artificial intelligence to generate comments based on the selections. So why automate it? I loathe writing tutorials and in PlumeriaSC 2 the tutorial lessons usually take a week to create. With the AI I can walk it through my selections in thirty minutes and use another thirty to give it the human touch. In my last post I wrote about VBAs (Vertex Buffer Array). The only problem is that they are really named VAO (Vertex Array Object). In my opinion the main difference with a VBA is that it owns its contents in memory (a buffer) just like a VBO (Vertex Buffer Object) and a VAO does not. A VAO only points to the VBOs that are already in memory.

VBOs and VBAs

PlumeriaSC is coming along nicely and should be available at the beginning of 2014. I was planning to get PlumeriaSC out by December but the Beta testers wanted the capability of creating VBAs. So what is a VBA? To understand what a VBA is I will explain what a VBO is first. VBO stands for Vertex Buffer Object. A VBO stores vertices and their attributes in a block of memory. Without a VBO the vertices are updated immediately and not stored in high performance memory. Since VBOs are preloaded into memory you can update larger amounts of polygons. PlumeriaSC 1 and 2 use VBOs but only PlumeriaSC 2 has VBAs. A VBA which stands for Vertex Buffer Array allows programmers to combine VBOs and store them in one block of memory. There is one big problem with some implementations of VBOs and VBAs. It is very difficult to replace, remove, or change the vertices that are loaded into memory. PlumeriaSC 2 allows for easy access to VBAs so the data can be changed or replaced without slowing the performance significantly.

Plumeria Update

PlumeriaSC is almost ready and is in beta testing right now. The lastest project I have been working on is the graphics. If you are still wondering what font the "2" is in the Plumeria Smart Charts 2 teaser video. It is in the Chalkduster font. Why Chalkduster? Because the PlumeriaSC 2 uses a chalkboard GUI.
An interesting tidbit happened the other day. I was testing PlumeriaSC 2 out and it kept crashing so I profiled it. To my surprise the App was running out of memory. I watched the allocations start at zero then sky rocket to three hundred megabytes and crash. What was the problem? My texture engine was not caching textures. Every time I updated the screen the same texture would be added to memory again. I finally fixed the texture leak and all is well. I was also surprised at how little memory PlumeriaSC 2 uses on the iPad. It is usually five to fifteen megabytes. At last check Xcode, which is the developer tool I use to create PlumeriaSC, uses seventy-five megabytes on the Mac.

Fixed Bug

I noticed the other day that one of my older movies of PlumeriaSC 1 was getting a ton of hits on my website. The funny thing is that the features in PlumeriaSC 2 are totally awesome compared to PlumeriaSC 1. It will be interesting to see what people do when the PlumeriaSC 3 teaser comes out! Another interesting thing I have observed is that most of the computers that view this blog are Windows users from France. Yes, Plumeria was named after a guy from France so I would guess that would explain it.
I will give a hint about what type of theme is used for the interface. In my teaser movie the number "2" is in a certain font that corresponds with the user interface.
Also I noticed the Mac OS X version of Be in the Cube had a bug from the OS 10.6 compiler which I fixed in OS 10.7.

PlumeriaSC 2 coming soon

PlumeriaSC 2 is in full development. Some of the new features include a simulator that runs up to 40% faster and flow charts that are up to 1/8th the size. The flow charts have become so condensed that you can fit a flow chart of a 3D square on one screen. So what's the best part about PlumeriaSC 2? It is also in development for the iPad! This means you will be able to create 2D and 3D apps in object-oriented flow charts on the iPad.