exult and blender

[artaxerxes]

this message is primarily addressed to DrCode, but if anyone want to share their point of view, help yourself!

I've started investigating Blender for the making of shapes etc. It's not that easy to master, although the online tutorial is really good. All in all, I think it would be possible to make shapes with it, assuming you know the program well enough.

Some very interesting advantages to using Blender is the possibility to make your character move. You assign springs and mobile part and it will calculate for you the moves. It can look fairly realistic, so the result might be less work once the character has been created.

Now the interesting part is since we can create many more actions, it is possible to extend exult to support new moves? For instance, only walk, stand, fight, sit, bend and lie down are implemented, but we could add any much we want, like one dedicated to the characters' main occupation, or eating, washing, etc.

On those words, I'll go back to making a shape!

Artaxerxes

[drcode]

It's possible, if we work hard enough at it:-)

What might be a little tricky is getting around the current convention where frames 0-15 face one direction (south, I think), 16-31 face the opposite direction, and then bit 6 specifies reflection of frames 0-31 across the diagonal. Also, the savegame formats only provide 5 bits for the frame #.

I guess we should get around that last limitation at the same time we get around the 1024-shapes boundary.

Or... maybe each shape could have an alternate set of frames where you could store the new ones. That would still, of course require a change to the savegame format.

BTW, I'm impressed by anyone who can do anything useful with Blender. I've tried a couple times, and barely figured out how to save a file. Have they really improved the interface in the new release that just came out?

[Darke]

Having played around a little with blender under win32 at work
when I noticed the latest preview release, I thought it was quite
neat, but it would have been more useful had the mouse curser
been drawn *over* the dialogue boxes rather then under them.
So whilst I found out how to save/load, I was unable to due to
funky z-order. *grin*

[artaxerxes]

try the tutorial at the following. It is really good at getting you started:

http://download.blender.org/documentati ... /c798.html

Artaxerxes