Minecraft Video and PlumeriaSC 2 Update

 

Since I am a huge Minecraft fan I created this video to show off a cool little trick I found to create a faster way to get around. I call it a water rail and it uses pressure plates, torches, stone, water, and a boat. This video was made in peaceful mode and not creative so whatever mode you are in should work.

Also I have updated PlumeriaSC 2 to version 1.1.5. PlumeriaSC has been put through some rigorous tests including prime number factorization and a comon core problem. I have not found any new bugs in the past month so the main bugs are gone.

PlumeriaSC 2 v1.1 Released

PlumeriaSC 2 v1.1 has been released. All code was specifically written for the iPad from the ground up. New features include a faster simulator, a streamlined file system, multiple touches, 3D touch, 3D dragging, new tutorials that explain all the menus, and an updated Stunt Kite game tutorial.  Also we have updated this website and our YouTube movie so you can actually see PlumeriaSC 2 in action. Finally this is the tenth anniversary of Solar Fusion Software and we have been celebrating by releasing our flagship product PlumeriaSC 2. So Happy Anniversary from us! Note that the new version (v1.1) for PlumeriaSC 2 costs $9.99USD.

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.