Monsterous

Many bugs to fix, but instead of fixing 'em I've been dithering between the best way to represent my world using immutable state (I suspect monads may be involved, and these horrors just won't fit in my brain) and... getting a model in game!

In this case, a very crappy monster has made the long and torturous transition from Blender to screen. Behold, the Cave Anemone (the five-tentacled starfish thingy):


It even casts shadows! Doesn't receive them yet, and frankly it needs better normal and diffuse textures than a few minutes in the GIMP can supply.

The screenshot also highlights the evil problems with normals at block boundaries (witness the horizontal and vertical smears visible to the left of the brave @dventurer) and the general horror that are the shadows. If you look closely, you can even see the wonderful mipmapping errors introduced by the sub-textures on the floor.

First goal will be to slap some more meshes in there, even if they're placeholders. I want one other monster type (Tentacle Mouse?), at least one inventory item and a player model. This will be enough to finally dispose of the glowing unlit spheres and @ model, and give a better clue as to scale issues.

Messing with Blender

Using the sculpt tool with high tesselation via multires occasionally causes this poor ailing laptop to crash, with varying degrees of severity. Still, managed to convert one of my concept sketches into a rough hi-poly model, ready for conversion to a game mesh via the lovely retopo tool.

I still think Blender has a pretty abysmal interface, but I am at least getting more used to it's craziness. With more time, fewer crashes and maybe a little time on a better computer I think it'll serve. I might even become nearly-competent with it.


Anyway, this is a low-level monster. It's basically a little sack of flesh and eyes and tentacles, drifting around the cave system using some gas bags for flotation. A lot of the mindless monsters will be the product of crude astral vitality and the warping nature of magic, and expecting them to make physical or biological sense is probably asking a bit too much.