It’s been a long week slowly adding tweaks and modification to my tool to smooth along the modeling process. My favorite new feature would probably be extrusion. That’ll come in handy later when working with levels later.

Easily the hardest part of modeling for me is the head. It’s not surprising considering the hardest part when drawing is, the head. What I’ve decided to do, is delay  the process about a week and model the head using clay so I can get the modeling correct. What I don’t want to do, is just accept the head and then later on become use to how it looks. If I get the head just the way I want it, the rest will be easy. The strange graphics where intersections occur are tentative.

I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do until I get more clay but it seems Block Felix may be around a bit longer.

I’ve taken some time to reevaluate things and following is a list of how things may go thus far. I wanted the game out by May but a realistic time frame may be around July. I’ll still be attempting to complete things as soon as possible without rushing.

End of March - First revision of true character Model
April - Complete Animation Support, World Editor Tool Derivement, and General Game Physics, New Graphic Implementations
May- Sound, Cinema, Combat, Items, Game Logic, and Prologue Chapter in Playable form
June and Beyond- Content Development and General Improvements

Wedged between that are a lot of fixes, tool enhancements and other things I’ve  forgotten to mention. Next month I plan on testing the game out on Xbox 360 to check for potential performance issues I’m sure you can expect it to move flawlessly. The month after, I hope to begin posting video of the game or to make some sort of trailer. If a fair share of people aren’t excited about the project after that, I officially haven’t met my expectations for the project. Expect great things!

The project seems so bare at the moment but it’s really starting to come together. Was I out of my mind to think the game could be done by the end of April? Probably, but the game was still 2.5D at the time I made that decision. I’m still targeting May although, there are still many potential 3D issues looming I’ve yet to face.

Block Felix has gotten a bit of an upgrade, this was to test out the animation in 3D which seems to work just fine. Facial animation seems like it won’t be a fun thing to deal with.

I may be somewhat giving the impression that Block Felix is near the limit of my modeling capabilities seeing as I’ve yet to show one good 3D model created by me and my modeling background is little more than nonexistent. Well hopefully the picture on the right helps towards redeeming myself a bit. I was testing out knee animation for one of Block Felix’s legs and somehow it turned into that. I thought doing a human leg might give me a better idea on how leg skinning really works. Obviously I couldn’t use the legs in the model but I think I learned about skinning a lot more.

HAHAHAHAHA!!! Wow! It only took 5 years, but yeah my collision system is finally up to standard! I can now perform the bare basic collision that any modern Physics system can do… Okay it’s ‘s a bit depressing to put that way, but its comforting to know I can finally do collision in just about any scenario without errors occurring on systems that don’t have physics built in. That’s you XNA! ; D

I won’t lie by saying my levels before were somehow limited due to my collision detection previously but falling through the floor or having something very ugly happen were a concern, especially with the hills. I really hope I’m not jinxing myself here but everything looks good to go! I’m going to revel in this for a while and I think it will show in the end product!

Ah, the gloves have clearly come off! ^_^

I knew this subject was going to drag me down and kick me, but I still wasn’t expecting it. I’ve been trying to properly do collision detection and while the detection part is easy the response part is always a headache. You may be thinking, “wasn’t collision already fine”? Well I looked into that and it seems there was even an error there I had missed. If this takes any longer I’m just going to give the go ahead signal and assume that my previous collision will suffice. Most developers probably just use PhysX for this, and the thought of “reinventing the wheel” is another thing eating at me.

In summary, I’m cranky!  |: {

I should have this sorted out soon. (hopefully)

Today I tried skinning and animating a quick model I like to call Block Felix and so far everything has gone without a hitch! It’s almost surreal that I’m finally doing it in 3D. Currently Block Felix just slides across the modeling studio and I use the xbox controller to animate him. In a way, I’m preparing for the game engine. I’ll be using Block Felix for a while until I feel I can make a real model without needing to redo anything later.

Much of this probably isn’t impressing anyone, but for something I’ve wanted to do so long, yes, I’m going to make a big deal out of it! Everything I did in 2D was actually planned in 3D first. My whole policy was to think in 3D. I drew this  some time ago to get an idea of what Felix may look like in the city and how talk indications would be displayed.

I’m  probably rambling now, I think I’m just antsy to see how it turns out. Personally, I think this is going to to be quite a show.

For a while now I’ve been trying to add support for a lot of things but I’ve already crossed over into march and I’m still only on 1 tool. I’m much too far behind so I think I’m going to have to cut the experimenting short. Here are some features I was thinking about and my verdict on them.

UV Texture Mapping

With a little help from a document from http://limegarden.net/ I was very quickly able to import .obj files into my tool as well as understand how the obj file works. And if I can import a file I can just as easily export one. I plan to do any major texture mapping outside of my tool. The teapot to the right was done hastily as a test run inside Wings3D . I’ll need to add support for where the seams are textured but that’s a minor issue.

One good thing about the import feature, is I can download and use free models. Why didn’t I think of that sooner.

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