Hello again! The volumetric cloud project has achieved the status of complete for now. I was finally able to get decent volumetric clouds rendering using openGL, cg and shaders…influenced heavily by an example from nVidia of rendering to 3d textures. The only thing missing to make them very convincing is self-shadowing…someday 
. Check it out!
Now comes the tricky part, what if you need to select a tile, or a character on a tile? Or more technically–how can you determine which tile your mouse is currently over? I should also mention that this process may sometimes be referred to as a “screen-to-map” conversion, taking the mouse’s screen coordinates, and converting them to map coordinates. In a regular map with rectangular tiles it’s easy, just take the x and y, divide them by tileWidth and tileHeight, then do the conversion formula: tileID = y * numCols + x (unless you use a 2D array).
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This is a new blogroll, obviously, but what we’re going for here is a community site geared towards programmers, gamers, and technophiles. Or just those curious about that sort of thing. We’ll generally cover a lot of different topics, from a lot of different people… but it’s all opinion, and open for discussion. We’d love to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to comment or shoot any of us an email.
So, let’s start things off with a bang, shall we?