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First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 140/512 (5/19/12)
Wow... sleepy this morning and slept in for an hour. That happens so rarely I thought I should note it. Was the nephew's birthday last night, so trooped up north for the event and didn't return until quarter of one... far, far later that I am up except on the most rare of occasions.

On the home front this morning, I have some bugs which cropped up in remote testing yesterday. It very much looks like the fields I added to player are working and holding their values, but if they are causing a bug that's going to be a problem.

The crash happens only on the underpowered Windows XP laptop and not on the more powerful desktop running Windows 7, so it could be unrelated--a lot of tweaking this week and something may have broken off coincidentally, which is how bugs often work. You get to work on a bug because of a symptom, and you fix the bug, and the symptom remains, which means another bug is at cause somewhere. This happens a lot, and sometimes the snarl can be very difficult to work out. And this one may be related to the crude pet functionality I'm trying to implement--was working on a healerbot, but wound up with a tankbot--and it could have something to do with the datablock inheritance chain. Or the guiShapeNameHud from last week.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 138/512 (5/17/12)
Wrestled with getting sound playing in the GUI again... some success, but also fail. Can get the soundtrack to trigger when the main GUI loads, but it won't play during the loading sequence and begins playing on top of the more innocuous zone theme when the player finally loads.

On the other hand, I did wake up with a solution to the issue with Palace quietly refusing to take a zone request, which I have been investigating and thinking about since Tuesday when it turned up. It didn't make sense that just that zone, after three days of testing, exhibited the issue. I remembered a problem with scripting NPC drops on the server--it seemed to have to do with timing, the standard time alloted for the internal event loop processing was too short, but I found by adding temporal spacing between each load out it could be made to work reliably.

I remembered that this morning so I've added the bits of script used to ensure loading in Gatehouse to Palace, and will test today to see if that helps... just need to let the server run for eight or nine hours first while I'm at work.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 137/512 (5/16/12)
Up this morning, looking over what I got up to last night... updating Vince Gee's view distance resource, hunting through the C++ for the appropriate lines to modify. Sometimes I'm so tired when I crash these days I forget what I was up to the night before. Must be time for another cup of coffee, then pull out the direction document and get started.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Sword, 136/512 (5/15/12)
OK, the only zirkot which failed today was Palace, and that might have just been me launching too fast this morning. Everything else worked through the Tuesday Night Testing.

Which is awesome.

First Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 136/512 (5/15/12)
Came home to discover that half the servers had faulted and lost their connections to dispatch, so spent several hours debugging the new Search function for finding players in other zones. Got that working, and put the rest of the evening to use wrestling with intangibles related to game mechanics. Then I broke off another chapter of the game design document... referencing specific subjects takes too much finding in the complete run for ease of use, so into subject chapters it gets broken to make it easier for me to look something up.

I find it best to review topics before proceeding to do any work due to complexity and unfamiliarity. Planning to tie together trainers, the experience system, and character stats is a big, complicated undertaking because they all intersect, and I don't want to make a mistake in implementation because I didn't have a good grasp of the material.

OK, there's a minor win right off... found where the name string was being applied to the Boglin datablock too early, causing it to show up too early in the hud. It doesn't belong in the datablock, it belongs in the onAdd. Fixed, and the same fix for the Kroagan.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Horse, 135/512 (5/14/12)
Looks like there is a bug when a search is run for players in zones where there aren't any... on return, the socket appears to shut down. Going to have to look at that tonight...

Continued to format Minis today while I worked on other things... I think I'll be able to get the website moved by next week, which will put it on a faster connection and free up the current web server for more backend development. Adds the overhead of "more things to manage" to my task list though!

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 135/512 (5/14/12)
Had a little trouble with filesharing changing out the site graphics this morning, but resolved it so new pics to start the week!

First Tikid, Hour of the Houri, 134/512 (5/13/12)
Got badging working again, and improved it along the lines of the experience design. Including a redesigned marker for the exploration badges, because I can do that now that I have a little skill in Milkshape, instead of having to use the first one from when I worked out the badge triggers some generations of levels ago, which I had to make in Constructor because it was the only thing I knew how to use.

Then I added the badging display dialog, and now have to get the title list returned displaying. Need to think about how to display them... try a folding list, or something else? City of Heroes has had problems as their badge list has topped a thousand, and each new attempt to address the problem has made it harder and harder to find any given badge, as they are spread across categories which must be viewed independently and not alphabetized.

At the moment I'm taking a side trip through thinking through a redesign of the treasure tables and how they work. Will keep thinking about managing long lists, but I think it's coming clearer.

Had a little trouble with filesharing changing out the site graphics this morning, but resolved it so new pics to start the week!

Third Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 133/512 (5/12/12)
Cool. Search function is working cross-server, so you can see who is on in different zones. However, I'm about to use all my RAM... eight Gb is no longer enough...

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 132/512 (5/11/12)
Up today, unusually enough, have iTunes playing Emerald Rose's "Merry May Folk." The weather here has been glorious the last few days in Northern California.

The direction document I created a couple days back is helping. I have a copy on my iPad, and I'm pulling it out and using it to focus regularly. I acquired three more Minis to use as surrogates on the surrogate network I'm putting together for testing. Have to put together an acquisitions document because I'm going to have to add a router for the surrogates as well.

Then I need to put together at least two PCs to start with as zone machines--while I'm sure that one can carry all the zones at the moment, there is no telling how they will behave under load. They don't need magnificent graphics arrays to act as servers, although I think I will add one more with a spectacular card or cards to demo on. It's not technically required, but it seems like a good idea, although maybe a laptop would do for that... a really good graphics card in a laptop is probably more expensive than a killer card in a desktop, though, and the machine could always be pressed into service as a zone server if it came to that. That's getting pretty pricey though, and I need to be really really careful.

Oh, that reminds me, I'll need to build a URI for entry to the subnet, and I'd better get a diagram of the port mapping laid out, too. I've arranged for sublet space to build out, and some bandwidth--I don't think I can really develop there, though, as I do best alone when trying to think.

It is seriously weird to be writing budget documents. Very different hat.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 131/512 (5/10/12)
I've been feeling a little disconnected lately, and I really can't afford to lose focus. Yesterday I got up and sat down and created a document to map out what's done and what's not done and what needs to be done, just to put my head straight and get on top of it again. It's a surprisingly long list, and I'm going to meditate on it to try to drive everything else out of my mind.

This morning, I linked in the right mouse click so it has an effect as well as swiveling the camera. After accomplishing it, I was a little puzzled as to why--I'm glad the functionality is now available, but I'm not sure if using it is semantically correct or not. There's no reason to have more than one click-to-indicate gesture, and the left mouse works just fine as a pointer for selection. The impetus was creating a pet drop point, as I want to add a player "helper" AI. Anyway, it's time to get ready for work, so I'm going to reboot into Windows and start the copy of last night's build so I can test it later.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 129/512 (5/8/12)
Been up since four working on the guiShapeNameHud. Finally got blue text for player names, and somehow, the text centered over player's heads, too. Have been working at making the code more solid--there are many ways to express oneself in C++, and not all of them are as good as the others... moved variables around so the colors are set once on initialization of the class, instead of each time they are used; got rid of the use of "find" since the color code is always a single byte--although that did allow for expansion of the color list at a later point although now I guess it could be two bytes--and so forth. Having a crash on the XP machine, but it's erratic and I can't say definitively if it is due to this or due to not having encoded all possible name strings--the values for the various classes are set in wildly differing places in the code--so I've just taken a stab at that on a run through the scripts.

Now, I've got to update this, and then get ready to go to the office. Hnh... just realized I could make it even more efficient by using the address of the color instead of making a copy of it at one point... have to look into that later, I've already made the client copy to test on for the day and I'm not sitting through that again this morning.

So funny... just realized the code for the Watch, one of the first NPCs I got spawning, is now hopelessly outdated and needs to be brought into line in order to work.

Oh, and I decided I'm happy with how the hud names are shaping up... at first, I wanted to use level-based conning like in City of Heroes, but then I realized with the way leveling is designed, the likelihood that any given monsters were going to fall into a narrow-banded range was highly unlikely, and so all that would be seen is purple or grey in most instances. Now, the colors indicate the relation of the NPC to the player, so "hostiles", "players", "vendors", "story givers", and "team members" (still working on that last one!) can all be told at a glance and picked out in a crowd.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Horse, 128/512 (5/7/12)
The guiShapeNameHud now has the ability to display text in different colors, based on a specification byte fed into it with the name. Not as dynamic as I'd like to make it, because there is no way to pass other dynamic information in. At least, not in the obvious way... setShapeName and getShapeName appear to have some subtleties I cannot yet perceive well, largely based upon the sequence of when they are used... obviously, it is possible to dynamically change the name of a shape... but when I do it, it doesn't seem to be picked up.

That I have yet seen, anyway. This will have to do for now... I'm pretty burnt out at hacking character strings at this point, and it's hot here. Even if my coding isn't quite yet up to what I had in mind when I started, I still made something which is pretty useful. The only problem being that deciding it is "good" and going this way with it makes going that way again with it at a later point much more difficult. Once you build on top of a system, you can be very stuck with it!

First Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 127/512 (5/6/12)
Been working on the guiShapeNameHud, trying to introduce the ability to have multiple label colors, and a few other tweaks. Very tricky, as I'm working in C++, and I'm really strugging with strings and const char pointers. Complicating things is Torque has its own versions of the functions in the standard library, with different names, and I'm been pretty much reduced to guessing. Each guess takes a launch of two servers and the client to see the result, so it's been a bit of a long day filled with a very boring compile and test cycle. At long last, I've gotten through most of it, and I now I have to go figure out how to send the extra byte of data I've managed to shoehorn in there and see if my idea actually works now that it is compiling.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 126/512 (5/5/12)
It's Free Comic Book Day! The family is coming down, and we're going to visit the local shop this afternoon, in lieu of attending WonderCon. WonderCon was down south in Anaheim this year because the San Francisco hall where it is normally held was closed for renovations. So this will have to do, and the kids will get some money and get to shop, which I'm pretty sure is still enough for them. Into the shower to get the day started... right after I encode a color value on the shapeName and alter guiShapeNameHud to be aware of the difference.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 124/512 (5/3/12)
My code has been rocking these last few days. Last night I solved the lot marker issue in a way that made me happy, and this morning, I just made spaces in player names allowable. The groundwork for the latter was laid when I worked up the HUD display last week, and now that bit is connected to the new character GUI. Oh, and I think I got the behavior fixed for the NNPC characters, so they "pay attention" to you when you are speaking with them. Off to test and then I gotta go to work.

First Tikid, Hour of the Warrior, 123/512 (5/2/12)
OK, now I feel smart. It won't last, but I thought of a way to easily reuse the existing mechanism for opening up the housing editor through the context of an item instead of the marker put in place while I developed the first generation of the system. I ran home after work and am through the first part of the implementation, now I have to hook it up to the item button.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 123/512 (5/2/12)
Seeing Apli was a rush, so I went back for more. Pursued implementation of NPCs last night, just to get them in, as crude as they are. And in the pursuit, I finally managed to crack the code for selective datablock load on startup--see, the number of datablocks is limited, and adding things like characters requires adding datablocks. As well as adding time as those datablocks have to be sent to the client every time it connects to bring it up to date on the state of all the dynamic objects in the zone it's connecting to.

So as the lists of datablocks get longer, the NPCs loaded will only be the NPCs specifically appearing in the client's current zone, and not all of them just in case they get bumped into.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 122/512 (5/1/12)
The last night was spent working with the Tall Trol model, making some of the floors into suites instead of rooms, so a number of doors could be removed. Then, the market stalls on Right Street were concatenated with the engine's Collada export into many fewer objects.

This morning I have been fixing minor things which have been bothering me but have been too small to interrupt other tasks and address. Slightly out of line doors, a place between buildings where the character reliably got stuck, that darned material for the chain in the chandeliers.

Then I put a counter into the player housing generation scripts, to track exactly how many pieces were being instanced by the script at runtime. This having to be parsimonious with objects is a drag, but it does seem to help with some of the weirder bugs of late. I wasn't able to repair the one I mentioned Sunday, I had to revert to the last saved build and port the scripts which had been changed forward with WinMerge. Not fun but everything seems to be working again.

Oh, and I got Apli in last night! After 30 years, the oldest named character in the setting has come to life.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 120/512 (4/29/12)
Got a substantial portion of the inventory server work done yesterday, including the dialog box on the client side and the game server<-->data server(s) passthroughs.

Had to stop this morning and look into another problem, as three of the four male human types have suddenly stopped playing their animations. Can't figure it out, as it doesn't seem to be model related--substitute the model from one of the unworking for the working, and it works. Substitute the working for the unworking, and it doesn't. All the other male models work just fine, as do all the females.

At this point, I've reexported all of the models from original source again, reverted the entire model directory from backup, rewritten the datablocks, scripts and other related loading files, and I can't figure it out. The animations just aren't being triggered for those characters, either in the preview gui or in the game simulation. Right now I'm defragmenting the drive, which in the distant XP past fixed errors where I'd thrown up my hands... not so much since switching to Windows 7 on the new computer, but I'm really baffled, and it gives me time for a break and to think.

I'll probably reboot the network next.

Also, today is one third of the way through the year. No pressure.

First Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 117/512 (4/26/12)
Did not get an update in this morning, worked right up until I absolutely had to stop. Replaced all the male figures last night, and the females this morning, with new exports. Then I had to go back and remember to take out the camel toe, and reexport, cuz... sheesh. That, at least, is fixed. Though now I'll have to repaint the textures because the curve has changed.

Remembered to fix the zone point between Rough and Gatehouse finally, too.

Am really fearing that a refactor of the levels is in order. All of them run really well except for Gatehouse, but Gatehouse is the first and most important level on the way to other places, and frame rate has dropped to where it still runs well but not as well as I'd like. And it only gets worse, not better. Of course, nVidia is starting to ship the 6XX series of new chips, so by the time the game ships, hardware may have made this fear irrelevant.

And it's a huge, enormous, colossal, inconceivable amount of work and time to build a level... so I am thinking very, very carefully about what would a replacement would even be like before committing to jump.

This level is the most satisfying I've built to date... and I've basically been building levels since before there were personal computers. Antra has had many iterations to date, with places like the Tal Trol dating all the way back, with me building physical models since I was able to. It's been on a hill, in the desert, by a lake. The shape and design has changed so many times, based on the influences and media I had at each time, so it's not as though metamorphoses is anything new. I have to take all the knowledge I have, and all of the skills I've learned in shaping, and push one more time...

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 116/512 (4/25/12)
If one can live as cheaply the first few days after payday as the last few days before, it is said, one can become wealthy. But is there a concept of payday in Antra? There must be, for there is surely the concept of being paid in coin. And thus the principal of credit, the trust one will be paid for one's time already given. And then the principal of interest, even if non-compounding--a fee for the keeping of funds, but not credited back towards the sum on deposit and kept in a separate account.

In order to have an inventory, one must have an economy, right? At least as far as getting beyond pebbles and acorns carried in the hand. And that way lies an inventory system. With the amount of crap one is expected to manage in a multiplayer game of late, it is going to have to be spectacular.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 115/512 (4/24/12)
Got a back piece and a sword mounted at the same time, after lots of testing, finally. For a while there, I could only mount one thing at a time, but now it looks like I've got multiples working.

Now I've got to run and hit the shower or I'll be late for work!

Third Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 114/512 (4/23/12)
Odd weekend... I would get up, work for a couple hours, then get overwhelmingly sleepy and have to take a nap. This repeated all weekend long, bursts of activity and then head-nodding. Did get a lot in... eliminated one layer of datablocks setting up monsters, got the damage block in over everything's head along with the name, wrote a C++ function to strip underscores right before printing in the GUI element, was able to modify the placement of names based on a per model test, got Migel and Min Ragen in, added a new low-level bad guy group, and wrapped up last night grouping more large numbers of objects in the Gatehouse level.

Did not get any sculpting done, though I had an idea for a new house type to go up against the steeper hills. Need to take the NPC behavior apart again, as they are rotating to look away from the character speaking in conversation. Character names appear off center, can't seem to fix. Think they are placed by eye node and not cam, unlike NPCs, but wasn't able to trap for it and found self staring over the brink at modifying ShapeBase, but backed away from that madness (oh! the netmask!)

Now I'm looking up mount points working on a datablock for a shapeImage for a shield prop. And of course, updating this. And trying to figure out the finances getting through next month, with three birthdays and Mother's Day in it.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Basilisk, 113/512 (4/22/12)
Early again, too hot to sleep any longer, so I got up and opened the door to cool the place off before the sun rises.

Sigh. Just fired up a server and a client... and the damage bar isn't under anyone's name. It's going to be one of those days...

Back to the datablock mines.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Dream, 112/512 (4/21/12)
Up early today... too warm to sleep already. It's gone from pleasantly cool to abruptly warm, and is promising to be a scorcher tomorrow. So I thought I might as well get up and get started on something. So I'm locating the coordinates and placing a starter figure in for Migel Seamster, vendor of fine white shirts. I want to get some of these minor dialogs, like volume control, attached to a key command today, too. There's a bug in the character picker pages too, having to do with the number of page buttons displayed. Adding one slot is adding two pages. Well, there's Migel, looks like he's got the wrong behavior attached.

Off to the datablock mines.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Sword, 111/512 (4/20/12)
Cool! I just got the GUI control modified so it displays a damage tracker as well as the name. Also got it modified so it now occludes properly if there is a wall in the way, so surprise is preserved if something is waiting "just around the corner."

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 111/512 (4/20/12)
For everything that is so fundamentally painful about Torque, every so often there will be a gem which is really cool. Last night I found one of the really cool things, the GUIShapeNameHud control. For a long time I've been dreading making the active attempt to put names over character's heads... if it was going to be anything like figuring out how to raycast, it was going to be like deliberately placing one's hand on the stove. So I've been putting it off, but hoping I could adapt the AFX effect which puts it over user-selected characters as a springboard.

The GUIShapeNameHud control is an overlay which automatically prints the names of all shapes in view... now, I'm pretty sure I'll be unhappy with it in short order--it only prints in one color, for example, and I'd like it to con in different colors right off the bat, based of course on the shape being viewed. I haven't looked at the C++ behind it yet, but I suspect there's a filter in there somewhere which can be modified (there's that stove burner again) to extend it.

The other drawback is it sees through staticshapes, so it gives away the presence of a mob hidden behind a corner by printing their name. I'm not sure if that makes me happy--I myself strongly prefer to turn off things floating over everyone's head, I find it immeasurably more immersive. Con information display is a pretty ubiquitous staple of MMOs, though, so the absence might be traumatic. And it just... just feels a little bit more real.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 110/512 (4/19/12)
Tired this morning, can't stop yawning although I've been up and had a cup of coffee already. Last night I concatenated more walls, and kept on testing. It's looking pretty good, but of course there are still hundreds of elements to figure out how to accommodate after reverting to the older map. What I need to do, I think, is shove everything in the level into a SimGroup folder, so I can then get a running count of elements easily and learn exactly how many have been placed, so I know when to consolidate again.

Consolidation, while it makes the game go again, has its own drawbacks--the elements are no longer available for "adjusting" on a one-off basis... I have saved a prefab of each group before converting, so I can sub the prefab back in place and break it up into its component elements, but that gets rather delicate as the complexity increases.

It's just I don't want to lock things up, while I'm still learning and growing as a modeler... every week, I am still getting better, and thus unhappy with what I did in weeks previous.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 109/512 (4/18/12)
OK, spent the evening chasing that bug. Had to crash while copying over an older backup, so I got up this morning and tackled that, only to find it won't load due to changes in the setup protocol with dispatch. So I copied just the mission file over, and that loaded, and sure enough, one door on the map didn't load.

Then I started concatenating objects into groups, and reexporting them from the engine as Collada files, then reimporting and replacing the original objects with the new single object. I did that for several large groups of objects, mainly walls, and suddenly--all the doors and torches are popping again!

Bug found. Squashed. It's going to be problematic, though, as the map was only about "half done" in scope. This last weekend's object binge with fences and gates must have taken it right over the top--the Tall Trol, with its huge number of interior doors, is now a problem instead of awesome!

Don't think most see all the invisible hours in a project, that go into things that don't show up on the screen. Five days of nights and mornings spent chasing this one down. At the office, I spent all day yesterday chasing a bug, and today, I will spend the entire day verifying it manually against various data sets today. These are huge costs on every project. This one can be ameliorated, I suppose, by grouping large groups of small objects and turning them into single objects, so there is a workaround for some limited value of workaround. It makes it very hard to change things, however, and I'm very much an iterator. So I'll probably also consider reducing the area of the level(s) in order to be able to increase the visual density with the same number of objects.

I really hate zoning.

Not zoning is a huge amount of work.

Seriously. We're talking hundreds of hours or more still to go.

It's like watching the extras on a DVD... sometimes it's astonishing how much work and experimentation goes into 15 seconds of SFX in film. The part where you really have to work in order to pull the trick off. The difference between practiced hands and newcomers is the acceptance of process--this making of levels is not easy.

But all the doors are back! I could probably kill a hundred or so particle effects, too, by adding an emissive material to the lantern objects instead of a particle effect for the flame, and another hundred by concatenating the lantern with the yardarm, although then I'd have to change the housing scripts again which place the houses...

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 108/512 (4/17/12)
The evening was spent in pursuit of the bug I noted last week... this weekend's additions have exacerbated the issue considerably. So I've been running through scenarios trying to locate a hook into the problem. I've increased the bit allocation for datablocks from 13 (the default for AFX) to 14, then 15, which had no noticeable impact, so I don't think it's datablock limits that are at fault.

I checked datablocks first, because I've been adding figures recently and so there have been many more put into the stack.

After last night's experimentation, I'm trending towards it actually being an object problem... the main level has grown very complicated at this point.

It could be a materials error... after all, it is objects disappearing (or not appearing at fault, and the objects are still there as their collisions remain in place (and NPCs will attack unseen), they are just not rendering or invisible, which could be a materials failure. That materials error involving the Torque trees always appears in the server console log, and that error used to be fatal (like crash out fatal) prior to the 1.1 bug fix going in.

However, that more objects are getting added to the level, and the problem seems to be getting worse over time, points to an object sourced issue. I'm going to try exporting Collada objects as single pieces from the engine, and reimporting them, to see if I can get the number of objects down without "changing" things.

The ominous possibility of having to redesign/refactor looms overhead as well... there is still time in the schedule to do this, but I'd rather spend it on other things. I suppose a good thing to do would be to try to trigger the issue in a level which isn't at all complex, too... if I can, then something else is at fault and I'll be spending the weekend reverting builds until I locate the last one in which the problem is not exhibited, but like the problem in early January, a bug can exist for a long time until the right combination of tests suddenly reveal it--usually when you are looking for something else.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 107/512 (4/16/12)
Spent the day at the office, at work, again. Managed to get out about 3:00, so the whole day wasn't eaten like the day before, and then came home and put the Boglins in. It took some experimenting, but I was finally able to scale the NPCs successfully, and so the Boglins are being tweaked to the right height. As are the Kroagan, who should always have been shorter than they've been pictured before (it was a good picture, so I used it anyway!)

Did remember to put new screens up last night so there would be new splashes this morning. Also built a lot of test fencing, and finally got the animated gate working and into a level.

Have at least a crude figure in place for each player race, with a matching (crude) skin! Having a little trouble with the bald head for the female figure, but I'm sure with a little reading and practice I'll get it right--adding a face requires mapping a new UV which includes it, and I don't know how to do that yet--I may start over and see if I can do it without adding a face... the current "skin paints" are all neatly arranged in one file and I don't want to change that geometry because then clothing can't be generic and reused on every figure... which vastly increases the cost of adding a character model. Additional repaints for differentiated figures have a huge cost--only so many hours in the day--to give up time or commit time is the most costly expense of all.

I can totally see how art becomes the majority of a project in short order. That happened to me last time--it took years of nights and weekends to paint all the thousands of assets. I would get home on Friday, paint until midnight, get up and go for a walk, then paint until midnight again for months. I'd really rather not get sucked into that again--all the current assets are supposed to be interim pieces anyway, meant to be improved on later. Emphasis on the later because polish is the wrong thing to obsess over at this stage. Just getting better is enough for this stage.

The pain in my side is easing... not gone, but not actively objecting to each and every movement either, which is a substantial improvement.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 106/512 (4/15/12)
Spent the day at the office yesterday. Then I came home, made some spaghetti with the sauce I'd started the previous night, and got to work on the character models again. Discovered I could delete vertices and weld others together without ruining the export, which helped a lot with the female character's hair. Unlike the males, the "hair" isn't part of the main mesh, but some scrap piece of mesh tacked on rather badly. The actual scalp is missing, so I am removing triangles and welding the remainder together to make a real scalp for the Deodan female.

Extended the character create screen a bit to include Dwarvs, Elvs and Trols, so the new models can be tested. Have to go back and replace the eight Human models, too, so all the characters are using the new rig made by Rex. And the datablocks for the Boglin have to be laid in so UAISK can see it and it can be placed in the level.

Also pulled some of the stone stairs out of the player housing area in Gatehouse this morning, replacing them with the wooden model. Not only are the wooden stairs more visually interesting, but the female Dwarv can't climb the stone stair model successfully, and that's really annoying. I'll scale the stone model down in another place and see.

It's one thing to make the small characters have to "hop" up big human-scaled stairs in some rare instances like a "death temple staircase of the giants" for verisimilitude, but another to not be able to take them at all in a main area of the game. All of the internal stairs in player house pieces seem to work smoothly with all character models. The female Dwarv will have to set the lower bounds of viable character scale in the game and always, always be tested against a new piece.

First Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 105/512 (4/14/12)
Wanted to write something triumphal, but I haven't slept for a couple days, and didn't eat last night. I seem to have developed another kidney stone, and while I'm not literally doubled over like the last time, I can't lie on my right side or my belly. I sleep on my right side. Always. I can lie on my left side with little pain, but I can't sleep at all in that position, nor on my back.

Finally the alarm went off and gave me permission to stop trying. Have to go in this morning. Couldn't finish something yesterday, and it has to go out Monday. I guess having the money on hand to cover taxes will have to be enough of a triumph for today. Yawning. Add more coffee.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 103/512 (4/12/12)
Received the final model package from Rex last night. Spent an hour setting them up as templates before dinner, then I got to work on the sculpt for the Trol, and had time to rough it out and put the character in game for a test before I fell asleep. This morning I worked on the Boglin sculpt, but have run out of time to put it in game and test, as that will be an hour or two adding datablocks before it will work properly.

Still chasing that bug described yesterday. Couldn't trigger it on the Trol, but might not have run around enough before passing out--really, really unhappy at work again, so thinking clearly is probably not my strong suit at the moment, which just makes everything harder. Like it or not, how I feel really affects how much I can get done, and I have not felt good there for a long time.

Third Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 102/512 (4/11/12)
Up this morning working on testing a slate of new model builds which came in from Rex at BrokeAss Games. Have to paste them into the build tree, then run around and do everything on them to see how they are working.

Looks like he fixed the faces on the NPC woman's skirt as they don't look funny any more. Yay!

Have a much bigger problem, though, which I just managed to trigger... unknown cause, but the character will be running around, and suddenly either doors or particle effects in the scene will stop being visible. Door, door, door, no door, no torches, and no AFX trigger. However, the character is still "at" whatever location they're at, because if logged out and logged back in, they will appear at the saved point correctly. Unsure of the cause, except that all the other mobs go invisible at this point, too, although they can obviously see me, as I've gotten killed by invisible NPCs now several times. The collision box testing for doors and NPCs remains in place, they just aren't being shown in the playspace.

This is a problem... not sure of the cause at all. Have to run around trying to trigger it until I can get a hook in to explore. Should probably take a swing through the Torque forums too, and run a search for "invisible npcs". Another good question might be just how many datablocks are associated with this particular mission. But I just spent and hour-and-a-half fixing a stubborn material file and now I have to get ready for work. Got too much to do there, too.

Second Tikid, Hour of the Jewel, 99/512 (4/8/12)
Very busy and productive day yesterday, I think. I awoke early, and started working with the backpieces, which had come as several parts and needed to be welded together so they could be passed to Rex of BrokeAss Games and used as shapeImages.

Then I spent the bulk of the day practicing in Milkshape, basically altering meshes and painting skins in anticipation of receiving the finished models. I came up with three pretty good variants, and then got to work on a dwarv, which is a little trickier because it not only involved modeling a beard, but scaling the model in the engine. Then of course, testing it with multiple clients to be sure they all see the height difference, new model, etc. This was mostly pure practice, as I will have to do it all again when the final templates arrive as the preliminary file I have now doesn't include all its mount points yet. Practice is good, though, it's good to learn the discipline of patience involved in multiple drafts.

This is something I've really had to struggle with. I think, because of my OCD, I had to work so hard to get a single thing down and get it to stick, that I never had the patience left to do multiple iterations of a piece, the way things are tightened up and refined, the practice that makes the hand easy. Doing multiple drafts, given the struggle involved in getting anything down in the first place, was out of the question. However, the process development and improvement in design found in iteration is also of great value. Sketches are tests, and now without gluten in my diet constantly triggering anxiety I'm finding myself more at peace with the process of sketching and refining. It does mean doing things over, but it's good practice as it becomes easier each time.

Have also tweaked the lighting script so it only fires once for each "lighting period", instead of every time the central time server updates the world servers. This cuts down considerably on bursts of lag, which was most affecting the AI mobs. They would freeze, then warp to a new position due to the overhead involved in updating all the clients with continual and unneeded updates to the dynamic lights. Making these changes to the light scripts, even though they now spiral on and on in the code, leaves the AI moving smoothly, even when there are 25 in a scene. Also tweaked the lighting scripts for sunrise, so the street lights fade out slowly as the shadows rise, as they fade in slowly as the afternoon deepens.

First Tikid, Hour of the Mage, 96/512 (4/5/12)
Wow, three days without a post... that's a long time for me to go without blithering! But I have put the time to good use, working with Rex of BrokeAss Games, who is straightening out some of the funky models for the player characters and at long last bringing them into line for the T3D engine. This is some pretty exciting stuff, because it's a stepping stone opening up the way to a greater variety of PCs and PC costuming.

The skeletal rigs for the character models in use have been pretty broken for a long time, and worse, the versions of the models supplied by the original vendor were not actually rigged properly from the get-go (this is actually not uncommon--it seems that 3D art skills and 3D engine knowledge lie along perpendicular axis, and it is rare they meet in the same individual, and none of the "Torque-compatible" art I've bought has really been ready to go into the engine without fairly extensive work). Now they are fixed, and fixed beautifully, so tweaks can be made finally and some new character types can be created at last--it's a little miraculous, really...

Rex backwards-engineered a Torque-compatible skeleton for the existing biped meshes and smoothly got them to fit a library of existing DSQ animations and it worked! That takes a truly arcane skill level, and a much deeper understanding of the Torque art pipeline than I've ever been able to achieve (or even seen in the wild)--Rex knows his stuff, which is my highest praise!

Second Tikid, Hour of the Rune, 93/512 (4/2/12)
Posting a bit late (although I did make sure to get new caps up). Worked through the weekend, but was a little burnt out, so I wasn't really "there" for it. Got my major goal accomplished, with sunsets in, and clouds now tintable under script control--I rigged a button to test it so the clouds darken and get thick, then reverse to normal over a few seconds. Then just for fun, I made it do it in green instead of gray.

Also raised the height of some of the Gatehouse buildings, and got most of the lanterns switched over to the newer lantern art. Added some bushes and got started on the rose vines, too. Had to really wrestle with the materials file over that last, but got it working finally. The bushes really add a nice softness to the edges of things... they are more English garden than French, though... I'd love some good topiary models.