Well mondays, or whatever the first day of my week ends up being are often sort of slow. I did a bit of work over the weekend, which was nice. In the end, I got some code working which represents textures as HSV instead of RGB. When I load them, I do a fast HSV->RGB transform, after applying a very simple filter (right now, just rotate the hue). This is useful because I can write code to color-coordinate things. I've wanted this for a long time, and now I have it! When I convert the BMPs over, I actually compute the hue center using a nice algorithm I devised and then, rotate it to red. So the BMP should appear mostly red, or hue = 0'. This allows me to then go and just say, "I want these rocks blue", or what have ye. I'm going to add a simple transform for S and V as well, which will more or less just be add or subtract from them. This will let me make colours brighter or dimmer or greyer or more colourful or whatnot. Remember this all happens in umake, so basically when umake is spitting out texture names for things it now has control over the color schemes of them. Ahem.
@p
What's today? Well, so far in this project I've kept with the philosophy of trying always to attack the biggest hole, and right now actually I think the biggest hole is the monsters all look the same. So, I'm attacking that. This is a big part of the graphics that have to be done for the game. Really I can categorize into a few parts: 1- monster gfx, 2- plant/rock/tree gfx, 3- ship gfx, 4- city gfx, 5- planet gfx. And in that order of importance. On another parallel stream to that are just general graphic effects, like to enhance the particle effects engine (not hard,) to fix the water effects (and I think I have this figured out as well,) adding shadows (maybe a bit tricky,) and some lens effects (need a GF4 for that.)
@p
I'm going to draw some little sketches so I can get some ideas and an implementation list for things. I need also to make more textures. Also, monsters will definitely have color schemes: reminds me of final fantasy 1. Anyhow... That's what's up for today. Lots of 3D modelling.
2004-11-29