I want to give everybody a quick update on how the new features are coming:
Have you ever started a project and found everything you do leads you to five more things you need to do? That's how this update is going. The list of things I need to do keeps growing, but it's still coming along. For example, adding the first river meant adding the ability to walk freely, since it's the sort of river you'd most likely fish from shore or while wading. I've got free walking working now, but that proved more complicated than I anticipated. It was fine on flat land, but didn't look so hot on slopes and of course the landscape is almost all sloped. Tonight I finished changes to adjust the walking animation on the fly to compensate for slopes. That's a matter of measuring the slope between the feet, lowering the body to keep the lower foot on the ground, and adding additional bending at the hip, knee and ankle of the uphill leg to a level appropriate for the slope. It's not as fluid or natural as it could be with a motion capture system, but it's a lot better than walking around on hills with flat-floor motion and in time I can refine it further. Next I'll need to put some limits on the amount of slope you can walk up or down, and the depth to which you can wade.
This also opens up an issue of walking. It's a long hike from the bait shop to the waterfall. I haven't decided yet if I'll leave it that way or allow you to pick from several starting points when fishing from shore. Since you can save your game at any time and place I'm tempted to leave it as it is, so if you want to fish up by the waterfall you'll have to hike there.
Here's another can of worms this river opens up, but it will lead to a fun new feature: Wading means waders. I could edit the models of each of the actors to add waders and retexture them to have a version wearing waders, but it's a lot of repeated work to do that to all the characters. That got me thinking that it's time to improve the models in general. Rather than add waders to a bunch of separate characters I want to build one new character that can be all characters. By that I mean I'm going to add more bones to the skeleton that will allow me to programatically adjust the features, and make certain parts like the hair and hats separate models, and use separate texture files for skin, eyes, hair, shirts, pants, shoes, etc. What that will mean in the game is that you'll be able to customize your character. Want a wider nose, higher ears, smaller cheek bones, a different skin color, facial hair? You'll be able to personalize your character however you like.
As you might guess that one is going to take quite a bit of work, but I think it will be worth it. I'm not going to wait until that's done to let people try out the hiking and wading on the first river, though. We'll just have to put up with wet blue jeans for the first beta test of the river.
I'm also working on improving the appearance of the water when the reflections are turned off. That's not quite done, but it's much better than it was.
I wish I could give you a date for the first beta of the river, but I'm still running into new complications and it's really hard to say right now.
Paul
