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.)
Case in point: When creating a new character, my plan is to have a preview of the character occupy most of the screen, to allow the user to customize the look some -- things like the gender, clothing/hair styles, and a limited set of physiology options, say, choose breast size from A-D cups, but not the larger sizes. It's a very good opportunity to work out how I want to handle building characters from their component parts.
The theory is simple -- there is a single, unified skeleton, which houses animations available to all characters. Characters are, then, comprised of 5 pieces -- head, upper body, lower body, hands, and feet. All of these pieces share a skeleton instance (as will any clothing pieces also attached to the character), which is animated to animate the whole character. It's the same methodology that practically any game that allows for character customization beyond texturing uses -- well, Neverwinter Nights doesn't skin the meshes, it just moves/rotates character pieces based on the position and rotation of its bones, but that's beside the point.
Problem I'm running into is the animation is being displayed strangely, and I'm not certain why. It seems like the hands and feet in particular are being influenced by bones they shouldn't -- later on tonight, when I sit down with it again I'll set up some debug output for it to see. Here's a screenshot of one frame of the idle animation in 3D Studio Max. This is how it should look, aside from the lack of texturing.
Here's a shot of the same animation in the game currently:
Yeesh.
Either way, I'm at the point where this isn't something I can put off fixing for very much longer. Well, I can put it off forever, really, the code doesn't care if animations are playing correctly, just that they are. But since I've got my level loading methodology, physics simulation, and rendering handled, I want to move on to actual game play code soon. The first step: Having a character to control. I could always dump a placeholder cube in there or something, I suppose.
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