andrewbuck {l Wrote}:Regarding the animation, it should be quite easy, simply do a semi-transparent texture on a single polygon (I would suggest a triangle but a square would also work). Then attach a bone perpendicular to the plane and rotate the bone (like your neck rotates when you look left/right; the gear would be like a book balanced on your head). As for lights, it would be fairly easy for me to add fields to the creature_class section of the level file which specify location/brightness of the lights relative to the creature's location. In fact, instead of doing an xyz location you could specify the name of a bone in the creature to use (like the weapons do now, only that code assumes the bones are Weapon_L and Weapon_R). As for fog, smoke, etc, Ogre is capable of it but I am not sure how to do it yet.
-Buck
I know that I can simply assign bones to the planes, however, the problem is not the rigging but the synchronization with the rest of the actions. If the actions don't have the same length, there will be either jumps or I have to change the revolution speed for each action.
I'm not sure what I should do about the glow effect, but there should be definitely something glowing inside the constructs, otherwise they'd look a bit dull. For the soulstone I could maybe add an animated billboard, that wouldn't light the rest of the model, though. Perhaps we should take a look at OGRE's particle system. Or could we attach a light/lamp to the constructs? I wonder how much the lights influence the performance of the game.
As for the growth of creatures, I find it very inelegant. First I even thought it was a bug. Bigger creatures will overlap even more and the textures get scaled up, which could look bad if we use low res images. It's also very illogical. Why should a knight or a dwarf grow? Giant dwarves are kinda funny, though.
We should find another way to show the experience and level of a creature.
