Over the last few days I haven't done much development on the Digital Spaces engine. A few bug fixes in support for the current STS125 project, but largely I've been focused on the content for that Space.

Saturday was Spore Day for me, having picked it up Friday evening. Australia got it a day or two earlier. Very unusual, that. Sunday was Fathers Day, which mostly ended up being relaxing and watching my wife play Spore. But I did get a good sleep in. A good thing too, since I seem to have developed a bit of a cold. No doubt a result from working late in this outside area (think bungalow, although it's not really).

The STS125 space is coming along very nicely, and has acquired a very nice bit of polish. Rather then the usual frame window on the right design I've used in the past, it was suggested we do a dashboard look, with buttons laid out along the bottom of the screen. This is working very well, and now the only thing left in the original frame window is the numbered procedures displayed in the sim.

For some reason, tracking bone objects is very expensive. I think it may be because Ogre is storing the bone data on the video card, in order to use hardware vertex skinning. This is a big advantage, but when the CPU wants to read the data, it has to pull it back from the video card, which is a slower process. Or maybe it's just having to calculate the current position in the combined animation tracks. There is some more optimization that could be done in the SGManager when dealing with deeply heirachied objects, but I don't think it will help with objects that are animated.