Ahhh hahaha =)
@p
I have the monster working great. I've implemented all body parts: final tally was still 19 types, but I reorganized them a little bit to hopefully get more punch. The only "heavy" one is body_layout, but, I think this works to my advantage. It will be a pain in the ass to arrange and animate body layouts, but it's ultimately okay. I *might* split it up a bit further, but that splitting will be optional. Like, if I wanted to, the current creature would benefit from a front/mid/back, but unfortunately the problem is that the animation has to be synchronized; so I think this is probably okay.
@p
Now, I have two remaining things to work out: materials and animation. Well, it's animated, but it's animated walking. What happens when it stands still? What about when it's attacking, or whatnot. Does it do that? Well, the body part division is nice because I think that like, for walking, I only have to really care about feet; the body can sway slightly while it's standing still I think. Certainly it's alright for the ears to flop around like they do.
@p
What else. Well, materials aren't really going to be too hard, I just have to figure out what groupings I want.
@p
After these two issues are done, the crawling monsters then have to be bonded to an AI (which I will also model-ify, i.e., even the monster AI will be autogen, but not at first because I don't really know if I have time for it) and I have to come up with some other code to place them on planets, generate them in umake, what have you. But nothing too hard. The AI actually is a lot easier than the visuals, because it is abstract by nature. Visuals are far more concrete!
@p
Well, this is great. I can get a LOT of general variety by modifying body_layout, even though it's a lot of work to make that particular one, and I think the animation won't be that hard either. I'll start off, I think, just making it so the legs and possibly body can be still.
@p
Maybe, an animation module that knows how to use noise to very slightly roll the joints around would be useful, rather than having to compose such things customly.
2004-03-04