Misc for the Week

In between the AI stuff this week, I had a few smaller things to deal with.

Scott sent me the completed character animations, so I was exporting those, and getting them into the game correctly. I’ve had to write some c++ to dynamically switch between 1 hand and 2 handed attacks depending on what weapon is equipped. There’s also a well known problem with death animations in Torque, that I didn’t know about until the game crashed when it tried to play the death animation. After all the problems I had with using TGA textures, I found out that you can’t use textures with *any* transparency on models with the Skin modifier, due to Z-sorting being too complex. I found this out after I had some wierd transparency issues on the Male Keeble model, due to transparency being used to show the eyebrows. It’s things like this not being documented that let TGE down, I’m quite frustrated to be running into problems like this all the time. So next week I have to find a solution to the transparency, and if I can’t, the eyebrow polys will be attached to the hair model, which is mounted separately.

I also made a tutorial level with a tips system rather than a hand-holding system. I’m going to use this for the first public demo release, which should be available very soon for a small number of people, and a bit later for others. I need some more time to get it ready for a more widespread audience. I also made an animation test level, with a ability for each animation. The ability only plays the animation, and nothing more. It’s another example of how flexible AFX is, can be used for so many things, quickly and easily.

That’s about it for the past week, aside from a heap of little fixes each day. Slowly getting closer to being an actual game.