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[Toady One]

All right, I've taken 3D models just about as far as I need to now.  I put in facing just now, so creatures will actually rotate to face the proper direction.  With graphics, the mutant nature of the random creatures is fairly evident -- I even had to shave all of their hair off to make them look stomachable.  Eye placement does not respect symmetry, so there are goofy faces sometimes:

   I'm too burnt out on creature models to continue for the moment.

[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Toady One]

This is a creature with hair:

[Demon]

Hmm...  thats pretty gross...  Joyce likes the furry one better...  Maybe there should be an option to Shave Everything.  You gotta make them have symmetrical eyes at least!  I dont want things like an eye in the back of my head...

Joyce, with great personal expense, showed me naked mole rats!  Its neat how they have the queen/soldier/worker castes.  One really has to question how useful the soldiers are...

[Toady One]

All right, the animals are unshaved, and they have (symmetrical) eyes on the sides of their heads -- this is kind of a compromise for bipeds and quads before I tease them apart.

I added reasonable hit locations.  Leprechauns had more trouble with my titan character.

The size difference is fairly extreme:

Now I'm going to do items...  finally...

[Toady One]

He he he.  I was testing something, and the game placed two empires (one of them friendly!) on top of each other.  Then it placed two cities (one from each empire) right on top of each other!  I had to go investigate.  I thought that the friendly humans would just act like normal and circle around me while I fought off opponents, but they engaged the hostile creatures!  It was about 4 on 4...  by the time it was over, only one hostile opponent was left.  All of the friendlies (including myself) perished.

[Toady One]

I'm putting it Zonk's Survivor Mode now, because I think it will be funny  And quick to code.  It's only 10:30 and I just downed a large cup of coffee.  Long night ahead of me...  I want to squeeze every ounce of creativity out of my body before it's time to start teaching calculus.

[Toady One]

Well, being in Survivor Mode helps for a while, but if you are being gang-stomped by five titans you will still end up an actionless yet living upper body ensconced thick in a mound of viscous gore.

Now that I've settled all of the details, I just need to finish item models and do liquid display.

I'm noticing some slow downs (in debug mode, which is a lot slower than the releases).  I can either work on speed prior to this release, or during the clean up release...  there is so much to clean up that I might have a few clean up releases in the end, perhaps working up to a nice round version number of 0.03.50  3.5% done!  I'm on a roll!

[Demon]

As far as wether to wait or not abuot the clean up...  If theres any part of the code that you already know could use an hour or 3 to optimise, do it now.  If youre going to have to investigate for awhile let it wait until the big clean up release!    

Were those the titans feet!?!?

[Toady One]

Those were titan feet  The player was a leprechaun there...  for a human it isn't quite so bad, although it is still frightening -- I've adjusted movement speed to respect stride length, so titans run up on you pretty fast.

Items are almost done...  I've got all of the basic models in.  I just need to do some tweaking to set everything up right.

I might be able to do some optimization before this release...  with the models, it comes down to the fact that you need a couple hundred triangles to make a good model, which is no problem initially.  But when you enter the town, and there are 60 creatures loaded, that shoots the triangle count up by 12000, which is bad.  I need to write some code that considers how far away a creature is from the camera (or if the creature is off-camera), and trims down that creature's model accordingly.  The size of the creature is also important -- if titan models are trimmed down they will most likely look bad since they are always large on the screen, but then if there are lots of titans around, things will slow down.  Lots of headaches to look forward to, but I'll arrive at a solution eventually.

[Demon]

If you want to get real fancy I have an idea.  I'm not sure how feasable this is, but here goes:  Check to see the relative screen space the model takes up (I would imagine with trig...  Find the 2-D area: (approximately) its just a couple of right triangles representing height and width) then base the detail on that!  If you could do that, then models you cant see wouldnt slow things down at all.  Seems easy, but only you'll be able to judge that!    :roll:

[Toady One]

Okay, so I've done a little speeding up -- models that are offscreen are no longer printed.  It helps a lot.  For the rest of it (progressive creature models is more than a one hour job), I'll wait for the clean up version.

I have a creature "radius" that I probable use to do something like that, without worrying about the trig calculations.  Just fit every critter in a sphere, then shrink the sphere according to how far it is from the camera.  If the altered sphere has radius below some level, then simplify the model.

Items all day today.

Liquids all day tomorrow.

The Release date is now fixed at April 1st (or before, depending on liquids).  After that, I'll just do a series of clean up releases.  I've written down the bugs/problems that have been reported on the board, and I'm finally going to get to all of them.  Then I'll have a nice, fresh project going into the next phase of the Plan.

[Toady One]

All right, items are done -- except for this weird bug where the items occasionally pop out of creatures' hands and start orbiting them like one of those blade barrier spells or a poltergeist movie.

[Demon]

Well, since its so easy to do, I guess Blade Barrier will have to be an addition to the magic release!    

[Toady One]

He he he.  I'll need projectiles first.  That's going to be a dangerous spell...  think about, say, an iron construct.  If the barrier is made of several floating spinning blades, and the construct just leapt into it, the blades would bounce off and go flying everywhere.  It would be like a grenade.  One of the blades could get stuck in the ground, so it stops spinning (but the spell is still trying to make it spin), so if somebody goes to pick it up, it'll start spinning and rip into their hand, unless they hold on tight -- it might make a good thrown weapon, since it is instructed to spin really fast and float.  Iron constructs are just going to be fundamentally hard to kill in this game, unless you're creative.  Maybe a wizard could create one, and task it to hunt the player mercilessly (maybe cast a spell on it so that it always knows the player's location).

A blade barrier would also be dangerous if the player creates one surrounding his or herself, and forgets to make it move properly while he or she is walking.  The same goes for "fire aura" spells and fire resistance.

Anyway, I fixed all of the basic problems with item models.  I have two things left to do:

1)  Don't print missing limbs

2)  Liquid display

I'll either release today or tomorrow.  There might be some annoying difficulties with both of these things, so don't count on today

[Toady One]

Got the first one done.  I also got another one of those lucky instances where two empires placed towns on top of each other.  After the kobolds chopped my head off, they got into a huge fight with a bunch of slinky deer.  Lots of mangled bodies.  I think the kobolds won.

But no blood pools.  I'm adding those now, then I'll put out the "Annoying Nonsense" Release.