thank you again Hetzen... I'm striving for a brigade level battle of Gettysburg. And learn I will have to do or miserable failure is in front of me.
Learning - we do it till we die, else those around us wish us dead.
Recently I learned how badly my map stunk. I stumbled onto the US national archives and found online images of last century maps of the Gettysburg battlefield - so I have months of art fixing to do, but at least I won't be guessing anymore. And I found out (since I was painfully struggling with photo-shop) how to do some of that work better and easier - I found out how the pen worked and how the stroke thing worked for instance.
A week ago my map was going to be a flat top down view, but now, I'm coding in C++ using the Irrlicht engine - a very nice community of people by the way, reminds me of the folks here and at Ashundar. Today I learned that there was a bug in their engine that left the vertices with an off by 1 problem. My map was shifted and one edge had all elevation 0.
Within 10 minutes, someone told me that it was a known bug and the coding fix was blah, blah, blah. With trepidation, I tried to recompile the engine and found myself with 11 compile errors dealing with missing directX include files --- 10 minutes later I had been directed to change a configuration file that would let me bypass those files. I tried it and it worked.
But then I learned that my openGL was running much slower than the directX code would have, and that made me want to download the directX SDK. Well, to make a long story short, now I'm learning that it takes forever do download 483MB at 11.2 KB/sec.
After I get that, the Irrlicht guys tell me that that there are more bugs and fixes dealing with terrain meshes, but they (code fixes - can't wait till March or so for the new release) are there for the taking... So, I'm thinking that the last thing that I've learned is that those German guys are much braver and harder working than this poor foolish Dutch/American. So much to learn, and so little time and the weak brain cells are just slipping through my fingers.
Learning plus persistence!!! Don't ever leave out persistence.
Goodnight friends.