Are colours applied to entire blocks or individual faces?
In models and maps, you get a canvas you can paint on. When creating new blocks, you can lay out the block's unwrapped shape however you want by dragging it on the canvas. There are 3 unwrap modes :
- collapsed: all faces are on top on each other so you get the same texture on all faces
- full: it's like cutting the box open and laying it out
- custom allows moving the faces independently from one another so you can pretty much do anything you want
There are transform buttons too so you can rotate / mirror individual faces.
Maps offer various shapes (cube, stairs, pane, post, slope, etc.) and I plan to add more over time. Models are blocks-only but I plan on adding a few sliders to deform them so you can make pointy things or roundish shapes by combining a few pretty easily.
You might want to check out
this little timelapse I did a while ago of me building an elephant model.
Is there a way to alter different cosmetic properties (such as specularity or bump maps)? If not, is this a planned/possible feature?
How about customisable lighting?
Not yet but I really hope to get to a point where I can add some real lighting (Global Illumination and whatnot) and various material properties. Still probably a long way off though as I've got more pressing stuff to do.
How will animation work? I assume it'll be keyframed, but will it be a case of using armatures or creating a separate mesh for each frame?
Model animation support is implemented and working since last month. One of the many advantages on having the models made out of blocks is you don't need to rig them / add a separate armature. You just use the model's block hierarchy and add keyframes for position / angle / scale / block size / pivot point (I plan on adding texture keyframe later so you'll be able to have animated faces & stuff
). I find it works surprisingly well.
I made
a video of a walk cycle animation while I was developing the feature. A friend and I also made a full animated pony walk cycle a few days ago together. I have yet to upload the timelapse but you can have a look at the resulting animation
at the end of this other video.
Which scripting languages do you plan on supporting?
Still a bit on the fence for this, but I'll probably go with Lua as the underlying scripting language (Alternatively I'm considering using C# / Mono). If you have suggestions or preferences I'd like to here them
.
I plan to have a puzzle-piece-based visual scripting system similar to what AppInventor or Stencyl do, but make the scripts editable without having to click through mountains of dialogs as I really think it hampers power users. Basically I'm shooting for the best of both worlds (raw scripting / visual scripting).
But I'll start with something very simple and improve usability as I release new versions.
Do you plan to include any form of physics?
Yes I'll hook up a 3D physics engine.