legs

Howdy,

I finished the legs and got half way through the death animation. When dying, he falls down to one knee then falls over. I've gotten as far as the knee.

I'm thinking about calling my character "Big Foot." You'll see why.

As you can see from the pictures, there are cracks in the body when the character bends. I knew this was coming and even started programming for it way back when. Unfortunately, I didn't know how much of an issue it would be to get those different body parts to connect. So, I'm just going to leave it be for now, so I can move on to the rest of the game. Whenever I finish this project, I'll swing around and make a human4 which will have the typical skin mesh that's linked to the skeletal joints. I just don't want to do it now because we're talking about an array of 2880 +/- vertices just for the body. And then I have to figure out how to texture all that. I can live with body cracks for now. I'll be a much better programmer when the time comes to redo all this.

I don't have any special insights except to say that I surprised myself this week with how comfortable I've become with OpenGL. When I first drew the upper part of the leg, it was backwards and upside down. I twisted along the Y Axis which is left/right for my person. So 180 degrees along Y is kinda like someone on the other side of the world right now from you. You're facing forward, they're facing back. Your up is their down. I was very quickly able to convert my front and back and then get my texture to flip around. The best part was when I knew exactly where to go in code to cull the other side of my object. It wasn't that long ago when it would have taken me hours to figure that one part out, but apparently I actually do understand what some of those GL_FLAGS actually do when enabled.

At any rate, here're the pictures. I'll try to have the arms done by the end of April and make a few outfits. Then it's just the head, facial features, and hair. Then I can finally move on to other stuff.

Cheers,
JD


I initially just copied the hips to draw the upper leg and ran into my first big problem. I use a 180 degree rotation along the left/right axis. So front is back and up is down now. Oh, and left is right after fixing the other two.

He used to have something more exciting than a black box, but I didn't want to get in trouble with the Internet Police so now he's nutered. 

The leg is taking shape.

Big foot.

video game

Hello Internet,

Thanks to the promise of horrible weather, I didn't have to work this weekend. And the weather wasn't even bad. Bonus!!! But I also didn't make that money, so ... mmm ...

Having the weekend off gave me the first chance I've had since January to look at the game. But, it was good to have that long break. It gave me the time I needed to think it over and decide what I want from this project and where I want to take it. A change of perspective.

I've decided to keep developing in Java and OpenGL instead of scraping everything and starting fresh with Epic's Unreal Engine. It came down to one simple thing. I don't have an idea for a game. So that powerful engine wouldn't do me much good without some notion of where to run with it. With the Java/OpenGL project, I can show any future employers that I have significant experience with Java. Given it's really unlikely I'll ever work in the video game industry, saying I have experience with Unreal Engine just won't be as impressive. And, I really enjoy the challenge and learning experience it's been so far. So I need to just quick thinking about developing a game and focus on the joy of just developing.

If it does actually become a video game, it'll be an epic fantasy RPG. Which is super story intensive, so I'll have the same problem as if I used the Unreal Engine. That I don't have a story. However, I'll have a lot of time to really think the story over, since it's going to take a lot of time to develop. That's kinda looking on the bright side.

Here's another fun thing to mention. Blogger keeps track of page views, and I actually have viewers!!! Wow. There's only about 10 of y'all, but that's more people than I've shared this site with. Thanks for viewing and please leave some nice comments below.

At any rate, this weekend I made the tummy for my person. Past-Joseph did a really good job separating the code and making it modular and reusable. Meaning, I just had to copy/paste and modify a few little things. 'a few little things' still amounts to 6+ hours of work, but it's the most clever way I could think of, and I never need to do it again ( except when I make the female version of all this ). But, to make a new outfit, I only have to add one line of code ( and that's going to be improved upon at some point ) and make the textures. Done. Making 100 outfits means making a couple of hundred images and just adding the name of the garment to the code. Since I know already the faces for my humans aren't going to be super distinctive, the outfits and hair styles will be the most important things determining identity.

I'm taking a Monday off in a few weeks for some morning errands. I don't know if I'll get that weekend off, but I'll try and hopefully have another post this month.

Enjoy the pictures.

Pics for my friends

Here are some pictures I took for my friend at my main job and my friend from the Philippines.

For my work friend, only the daffodils have come up. The amaryllis should be popping up in the next two months.

For my foreign friend, sorry the nighttime pictures didn't turn out very good. It's hard to capture 'spooky' in low light.