It's Alive

Howdy,

Well, I was home this weekend and looking forward to some me-time, getting back on the diet, goofing off, and binging on youtube horror series. Then the Internet went out. It was an interesting experience. It’s been a long time since I’ve been alone with no Internet. It was good to get in touch with that side of myself again.

I read. I cleaned. I caught up on chores. Then I pulled out the video game project I’d put aside. It’s really interesting the Internet failed when it did, because earlier last week I figured out how to do some body part rotation that had stumped me when I quit. Apparently, in the back of my mind, I’ve been working on that problem all these months. So, with nothing better to do, I pulled the project up to see if my solution was doable.

It was doable, although I could have done it faster with the Internet for reference. With nothing better to do, I played around with textures and got body part texturing to work better for this new approach I’m using with human4. Then made some more plants. Then, because I’ve been reading Lovecraft, I wanted to make some fossils followed by spooky monsters. I did make a rock object with a texture slapped across it. It still needs a lot of work with shaping and adjusting the texture wrap. But, it’s an addition.

It was very rewarding and very validating, and now I want to pick the project back up. I guess, sometimes, I just need a 5 month break.

There’s a bug I need to work out with skeletal animations and timing, then I’ll probably be ready to make outfits and more body parts. Now, with the body part rotation feature, I can do things like twist the wrist that human3 couldn’t do. With the rock object, I can start making props other than flat pane plants. I can start building scenes with more interesting features than the landscape.

I don’t have any pictures, but expect them in future updates.

October's Arm

I got one day off earlier this month, and I worked on drawing a body part. I was expecting more time off, but apparently it's not going to happen. In human3 I drew body parts in two parts. A front and back. Each was a 10x10 2D array of vertices. So, that's two hundred vertices for one body part. It made texturing very easy after I figured out the first one. In human4, I don't want 200 vertices for each body part. I just want as few as possible. This will help with frame rates and such, but texturing is going to be nightmare... when the time comes to do that. At any rate, I drew an arm this month!

September - blue grass

I was afraid I wouldn't get anything done this month, but I managed to make a new type of plant. So, technically I did something in September. Even though it wasn't much.

August 2018 - grass fire

This month I didn't get a weekend off either, but I did put a few hours of work into the game. Mostly I tried to smooth-out and straighten-out the walking animation for human4. I couldn't really show that with still images, so I made a new type of plant just to have something new to show for this month. It's supposed to be yellow grass, but it turned into a little patch of grass fire.

July Game Dev

I didn't get a weekend off this month, but I did make some major game development decisions. I moved off of human3 and started human4. It has much ... less sloppy animation logic and includes a second degree of joint rotations. Hopefully there will be more exciting things to see next time.

fleurs

May Progress

I got today off work for some holiday and finally got to work on my game!

I finished up the forearms and hands and then made outfits. Making outfits is as simple as updating some image files for the texturing. It only takes a minute, but it took me years to get to this point. Oh lordy, texturing was tricky to learn.

Then I worked on pulling the garment choices out of code and into an xml file that much of the game data will be stored in.

I worked on death and added an upper body motion. I just have my person drop to his knee and that's it. I wanted to follow it up with him sliding to the ground before fading out, but I don't have that kind of rotation built into the hips object and I'm not about to redo that. When I make a human4, I'll be using a much better skinning technique and this won't be an issue.

Then came making a head object. Thankfully there was a lot of reusable stuff that I was able to work with that made it pretty straight forward. I was on a roll at this point. I then made adjustable hair color.