Player models, music, sound and UI

Player models

The player model v2 is getting almost ready.

Looks exactly the same as the old one, right? Wrong!

As you can see in the image above we now have cut off joints. The arms, legs, torso, fingers, etc don’t bend or stretch anymore.

This has many advantages. For one, the modding will be easier for the end user. Also development will be much faster for us and adding new clothing should be a breeze.

You look so fine, suit man! Yes you do!

Sound and music

We have another new artist / sound guy helping us out! TaikaKim of Aavepyörä fame has joined our team and is helping us with developing sound effects, interesting ambient sound scapes and general game design. TaikaKim has been making music for some ~19 years under the name Aavepyörä and is an invaluable addition to our sound team.

If you don’t already know Aavepyörä and you like trance music you should definitely check it out. TaikaKim is one of the early pioneers to give their music away for free online - so if you like the music please show some support and buy an album or two.

UI

We decided to switch over from JavaFX to Lemur.

Lemur gives us better flexibility and 3D features with less effort. For one, we will have the ability to use UI elements on 3D objects. For example we could make a book where you can turn the pages and it has clickable UI menus, buttons and sliders on it’s pages, etc.

Really cool stuff to have.

Unfortunately due to the switch UIs won’t make it to the next milestone release in time as you can probably deduce from the image above.

The first milestone is approaching fast

Only 7 days until the v0.0.1 deadline!

Our goal is to have a working client for the v0.0.1. The criteria is that the client will not crash, it should show a simple render test world that you can move in, a simple player model rendering without animations and nothing will have collision detection, yet.

Sounds simple enough. Then why it is taking so long?

What I have described above is actually something you can achieve in a single day. But it’s not incompetence that’s taking us so long. We have networking to consider, building a working mesher, sending octree data over network, logging in and network security and a lot of other stuff that is not simple and fast to do.

Things take time to do properly so we don’t have to retrofit the code, rewrite and keep rewriting as we go.

Soon we should have awesome in-game screenshots available to you showing cubes! Beautiful beautiful cubes...

Until next time!

This article was updated on 20/10/18 @ 18:12