We have decided to rename our company from Black Carbon to Bit-Shift! We have also scored a new domain bit-shift.io and website. This should be up and running in a few weeks as we fit around study and work.
Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored...
Well, the Kickstarter is finally over and the results have been abysmal. We only had a hand full of backers, so thank you to those people. The Stats Lets look at some stats: In the last month, we have had about 1,400 people come to our Kickstarter page with only 12 people following through - a conversion rate of 0.857%. Reddit indicates that 43,800 people viewed our adverts, with 507 clicks - a conversion rate of 1.158%. Youtube indicates that 29,000 people viewed our adverts with only 29 clicks - a conversion rate of 0.1%. Twitter failed to even launch the advertising campaign and our attempts to reach out to them fell on deaf ears. Also our attempts to reach out to the gaming press also mostly fell on deaf ears with the exception of gaming on linux . From my research a conversion rate of about 1-2% is normal. What now? We have taken the last month to reflect and pester the press and twitter (with no luck). We lack the funding to be able to complete Trains ...
Terrain Yes we are dealing with terrain again! While we had 8-bit initially, then went to 16-bit but found using texture image editing software support lacking so we decided lets just make 8-bit work. As we proceeded, I just wasn't happy with the terrain, and as you increase the terrain geometry it would start to "step." The final nail was to see the tracks again also going "jaggey" making things look terrible. Terrain quality at varying bit depth See what I mean?! So whats changed now? Well, we've embraced blender as our terrain editing tool. My bro, the artist on the team has been programming the tools to allow us to use blender in our terrain pipeline. This has freed me, the programmer on the team to do some art! What have I been doing as the artist you say? Well, I present to you... Texas Texas posing for a beauty shot Ain't she a beauty? This is based loosely off of actual GIS elevation data, which we take into blender and smo...