Screens of the day 23 - Some new model tests

I've got my desktop back! It was repaired a few days ago but we were hit by an uncharacteristically snowy winter. We did not have such a winter in a lot of years and I had little inclination to spend time on the streets, even if that meant recovering my PC. But anyway it is back and works apparently well. I missed it! I am going to give it a name now! The desktop has been repaired and has two extra coolers so now it is loud as hell and greatly effects the temperature in the room. Having used my laptop for development during this period I can tell that my laptop is an awesome piece of hardware with sufficient performance. Well, it is a 600€ laptop. Still, using a 22 inch monitor on my desktop is a lot more comfortable that the 15 inch laptop screen. Just need some earmuffs now...

When my desktop broke it killed two 650 GB (not GiB) hard disks. There is world wide hard disk crisis (which I feel is partially artificial because of retailers panicking and buying more hard disks than the real demand) so I won't buy new disks right now because they are 2-4 times more expensive than before the crisis. So I am stuck with a 320 GB hard disk on my desktop. I have the habit of creating a partition for my Windows and a separate partition for everything else so I can format and reinstall Windows at will without having to back up data. But this time I made a single 200 GiB partition for everything. What am I going to do with the rest of the 90+ GiB? Install a few version of Linux and see if I can get the Linux version working. Using virtual machines is not a good idea at first because my game requires a lot of GPU power and hardware support under Linux is hardware support under Linux. Sigh...

Anyway, Snapshot 5 is buggy as hell. I fixed most of the bugs but there are still a few big ones left. And I've been working on some fairly interesting things. One evening after fixing some bugs I started playing around with the game and without noticing 30 minutes have passed! Everything is starting to come together and I think I'm only 1-2 snapshots away from a version that puts together everything you have ever seen in one of my videos or posts regarding the 3D engine. And about 3-4 snapshot away from finishing stage 1 creation mode. This version will be officially designated as version 0.2.5, while a stage 2 creation mode will be version 0.3.

Most of the new features and tweaks are only half way done so I can't really talk about them yet. I already have a 14 point changelog. While there are a few very interesting changes there, one of the more minor changes overshadows I feel even the huge ones: scrolling and zooming has been smoothed out. No more jerky camera movement. And using fullscreen without vertical synchronization has significantly less screen tearing. Before screen tearing was so bad that turning off vertical synchronization in fullscreen mode was a very bad choice. Probably no one could play like that without rage quiting and probably getting a headache. Still, the amount of changes is comprehensive enough that I probably won't finish and test everything by Monday, so it may turn out that Snapshot 6 will be delayed/kept private. I don't want another super buggy Snapshot 5.

So what can I talk about? Hmmm...

Here, have some new model concepts:

The above thing is a weapons rack. It is a little bit high poly, but I generally like the shape. It is meant to be made out of wood, maybe with the little things that stick out make out of metal. for now I am not planning to add stone weapon racks, but if I ever do they need to look differently.

This model combines smooth shading with flat shading. I have no idea if my engine likes this and the item will turn out looking OK. This render uses shadows so in the engine it will look slightly worse because of the lack of shadows. I really need to find a way to bake the shadows into the textures and see if this looks good. This will not work with dynamic lights, but for now I have no such things. Actually, I have absolutely no idea how all the items I am going to show today look in game because I haven't had the opportunity to check them out yet. The items are modeled quite amateurishly and are not optimized.

Above we have an armor stand. Low poly but it looks good. I need to add a little rounding to the bottom of the central pillar because it looks too flat but overall I am happy with it. Made out of wood.

Above we have a wooden chair. Low poly again and this model really lends itself to the "diversity" approach, that is making a lot of alternative models. The proportions are a little bit of, but generally it is good.

And finally we have the wooden table:

I wanted it short and stumpy but I don't like the result. The wooden models were designed to have a different shape from the stone ones. No effort has been put in yet to make sure that items look good and are instantly recognizable from a top down view, because this is how you will spend most of your time interacting with the world.

Still no luck with finding a modeler. I really need someone with good artistic vision to make sure that all items are consistent and look like they were part of the same universe. If said artist can also create more unique aesthetics so that everything not only looks consistent but also has personality, that would be just spectacular. Meanwhile you'll have to do with my models.

In my next screen post I'll show you the items in game.