This has been a busy week. I've been focusing mostly on character animations and editor upgrades. The editor, in its present state, is very usable, though I still see room for improvements. There are no plans yet to implement them, which basically means that I'll fix it when something gets in the way too often.

What there are plans for, though, is finishing animation work and adding some lighting effects. Those include light sample cloud for static objects, lens flares/light source sprites (they'll be soft, consistent and fairly predictable/static, so it should look very nice) and possibly some dynamic lighting as well.

Here's some pictures from the development that I made on the way:

02/16: Z offsets for vertices (for making sloped surfaces)

02/17: some editor design testing

02/18: implemented level saving, this is my first saved level

02/19: finished level compilation with lightmaps

02/20: linked editor lights to lightmap compilation

02/21: first imported animation

02/22: did more level design testing while working on animations...

...and it turned out that my mesh/animation export/import was broken...

...so I fixed it...

...and spent the rest of the day trying to put some lighting on the character.

02/23: finished the week by implementing animation player and doing some camera view testing

 

So only the animation mixer and ragdolls are left to implement for animations. Expected to be done this week.

Work not listed around the screenshots:

• Editor marker now adjusts to the height of the currently edited object.
• Implemented light sample entities in the editor.
• Added convenience shortcuts for block drawing (can set z0/z1 in drawing properties)
• Implemented null/black surfaces (null are removed, black don't use any space on the lightmaps).
• Implemented lightmap sample correction (moving them out of obstructions to avoid black spots).
• Implemented off-mesh lightmap sampling (for light sample entities).

Work listed but still important enough to mention until the end of time (well, maybe not that much):

• Character animation pipeline! It is a real pain to get it to work, so respect is well deserved for all those programmers who manage to do so, especially if it's done more than once and within all sorts of deadlines.

If you think I can keep up the development, and if you're interested in what's going to be made here, please visit the Steam Greenlight page and vote for the game. It would mean a lot to me.