Targeting Behind The Scenes

Hmm sometimes the life of a game developer isn’t all swords and sorcery. Lot’s of fairly dull behind the scenes stuff was done this week.

Animation reared it’s ugly head again and yet again i THINK I’ve solved the problem. I won’t even bore you with the details – and I really don’t want to be writing another post about animation (the problem seemed to be that my FBX importer doesn’t like root’s of bones being rotated – anyway that’s really dull).

I wanted to move towards actual combat with the picture rat so of course I need some way of targeting it. For now I’ve gone for the Everquest/WoW targeting arrow style. The reminded me that I already had a renderer for transparent models which works quite well. So I needed to make a targetting classes so the spinning pyramid could be attached to other game objects. As you can see in this picture I’ve targetted myself.

Luckily (or not really lucky at all) I already have a nice “picking” routine for my editor to allow me to select a house or a fench or whatever and move/rotate/scale it so I can use that to select the monster that I’m going to attempt to send to a higher plane of existance.

Oh and I made the blendmap higher resolution so I can change from grass to gravel to mud or whatever over a smaller area of land. I may well use a double blendmap to allow me to have 6 textures on the terrain but we’ll see. Maybe I can use the alpha channel in a png blendmap but that didn’t seem to work last time I tried it.

Here’s hoping for a more interesting update next week.