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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.

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.

Today I decided to try out my new tool and make a foot. Everything feels so sophisticated now : )! What you see is a foot made up of about 133 triangles. I don’t think there’s a good reference as to what my poly count should be so I’m really just following my gut. I kinda cheated in the image by having per-pixel lighting enabled but I wanted to get the full effect. This style of lighting is expensive and I’m really skeptical of its use.

Next is one of the main reasons I avoided 3D, texturing. When I make it out of that nightmare, I’ll move on to the entire body. Worst case scenario, I have to set the texture of each vertex 1 by 1.

I made this terrain yesterday using the old tool. The old tool had no indexing for terrain and that created a lot of waste. I plan to pull no punches towards graphics this time around and so file sizes are something I’m wondering about. Probably nothing to be worried about of all but if I can save a great deal of space simply by restructuring things, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.

I think to really achieve something commercial I may need to look into bump mapping or shadow maps and per-pixel lighting and definitely into more multi-texturing. Looks alone will get me nowhere but it most certainly help!