Monday 6 February 2012

Sunday Progress

A few really minor features added over the weekend:

  • Mouselook. Trying out an implementation where you can only look around in a limited arc, and having the view direction automatically rotate back to the default when you start moving or turning your character. Not sure on this, might be more useful to have your character's direction change once the view rotates sufficiently. Danger here is that I'd like to have facing be an important tactical concern within the game, so character rotation is a distinct action that you don't want to trigger by accident.
  • Textures! OK, this was a ten minute bodge-job hooking up javax.image.ImageIO to grab JPG and PNG files, and they don't even have mipmaps yet. But it works, and as I have a working DDS export implementation... getting DDS import in place shouldn't be too hard. Then they can even be properly compressed textures with pregenerated mipmaps and all kinds of... ancient, unremarkable technology.
  • Tangents! And Bitangents! I'm just generating these at load-time from the data in the .obj files. I'm fully aware that at some point I'm just going to have to face the Python and create a Blender export script to a more sensible format, but... bleck, Python.


As a consequence behold the power of really, really ugly normal and diffuse maps:

More importantly than all this minor tech progress, and thanks in no small part to the aid of He who is called Fhtagn, the game actually has a design document! And the design is, at least for now, inspiring. It's good to have a direction. We're currently lumping everything in a few shared google docs, which is a nicely asynchronous way of working.

In between writing the code and reducing the inspiration quotient of the document, I've been playing a bunch of CRPGs (I blame finding The CRPG Addict's blog archive). In particular: Morrowind, Wizardry 8, Temple of Elemental Evil, Neverwinter Nights, and Neverwinter Nights 2. Flitting about between these is playing merry hell with my ability to keep track of quests, but the contrast is fascinating.

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