Follow-up

Apparently 3d studio max 9 exports properly. This is disheartening, as it ties me down to either an older version of the software, or running two of them. Le-suck.

Oh well, at least this means proper animations might actually happen.

Argh. Well, I am at least certain what the issue with my animations is -- the finger bones aren't being positioned correctly in the base skeleton. Well, they are in 3d studio max, but not once they're exported via OgreMax. Thus, when the hands/fingers are animated, the bones' position/rotation offsets aren't correct.

Now for the big question: Why.

I suspect an issue with OgreMax.

Animation Woes

Progress -- and a point on which I am stymied today.

Did some work on the level format loader -- added in the ability to parse cameras and lights, for one. And to define some physical properties of objects in the scene. So the basics of level formats is in place -- I'll just need to work out how to handle some special cases (things like, say, a security camera. No, really. How awesome would it be to have security cameras in the level that render what they see to a texture -- which can then be displayed on a monitor in game or somesuch [The same computers which could, say, load up a web site to display.])

Still having issues with animations -- not that I've messed with it a great deal in a while.

(Slightly NSFW image after the cut. If, you know, this being a blog about a sexytimes game didn't really imply that boobies might show up.)

Mapping!

One issue I keep running into time and time again with the production of this game is my inability to produce quality art resources. It's unfortunate -- and due to the nature of the game, I am hesitant to ask for assistance in this regard. Perhaps later, when I have enough put together to actually post a download and really release it into the wild.

Been pondering how I want to handle the map. Currently, I'm using a section of the mall from Dead Rising, extracted from the game itself. The mesh isn't ideal for my purposes, though, for a couple of reasons -- though the layout is pretty spot-on to what I'd like to do. There doesn't appear to be any pre-generated collision meshes or anything, nor am I certain how the game handles NPC navigation.

Time for a Little Blathering

I know, I keep making blog posts but nobody's even aware this exists, so they aren't seeing it. Kind of makes you wonder what the point is, eh? Sometimes, I just need to braindump, and this helps. This is one of those times.

Firstly, I've been wrestling with what I want to do with stats and mechanics -- I want them to be present, I know. I feel like a game of the sort I'm going for needs some kind of character advancement. It's one thing to be slowly transformed into a bimbos, cow girl, or whatever and another thing to be able to increase your character's strongliness or stamina or whatnot.

Which brings me to an interesting point. Tempestreturns over on the TF Games Site forum made a comment in a thread about their own game, HERS-3X, that the health stat implies physical challenges, and having events that affect your health was getting too close to violence, which they don't want to write about in a sexytimes game. Reading that particular point in the post was kind of a 'well, duh' moment for me. It's one of those things that makes perfect sense, so why didn't it occur to me before? When I ponder what gameplay would be like in Bimbpocalypse, here, I lean a little too close to mimicking Dead Rising, I think. Wading through a crowd of bimbos and wailing on them with a baseball bat is probably not very appropriate for the overall theme of the game -- it's supposed to be sexytimes.

Wee!

The more I fiddle about with BEPU Physics, the more impressed I am with the library. It's written in .NET, so I already have a strongly-typed, managed way to access it. It's thread-safe, and has its own thread manager. It took me something like 10 seconds to set up multi-threading in my little test scene. About 10 more to have BEPU updating completely asynchronously from the render queue. 100 active crates? 280 FPS (which is kinda low -- but this is with an idletime rendering queue, rather than a dedicated render loop. A dedicated render loop would, no doubt, run much faster, but make it more difficult for me to let the OS handle mouse/window events. Perhaps that is an experiment.) 200 active crates, and another 60 inactive? 230 fps.

The only downside I can really see is its inability to serialize/deserialize mesh data. Granted, it allows for the creation of arbitrary meshes, I can't help but feel like pre-serialization would lower loading times -- passing the mall scene so far straight in is detrimentally slow. I've not actually had the patience to wait on it, but some of the chunks were taking 3 or 4 seconds apiece to generate a physics representation.

Granted, throwing some 350,000 vertices at it (among like 80 meshes) is a bad idea in general. The more I think about it, the more I can't help but feel like some sort of editing tool is warranted. Something that would allow me to configure a level layout, define/generate physics properties, etc. And some sort of actor studio, to let me make some preset configurations for NPCs or somethin'.

WE SHALL SEE.

(No, really)

Decided to take a brief break from working on the game, as I'd run into some issues with memory management. That turned into me getting distracted by life in general, but I'm getting back into the swing of things again.

Memory management is still a bit spotty at the moment. But I did implement a basic SSAO manager which has, like, no discernible effect at the moment. It seems to just kind of darken everything unilaterally. Will need to play around with it more -- and disable the skybox when it does its lighting pass.

Working on implementing some simple physics. I know, I know. Every game these days uses a physics library for no reason. But, you know, I really do like the idea of the player stacking some heavy boxes in a door to keep it shut or something. Emergent gameplay like that is all-but impossible without at least a basic physics simulation.

Moral of the story: No real progress, but code is hitting the table. And everything just keeps growing. Stupid textures directory.