As some of you may have guessed, I've been busy for quite a while, but I never gave up on any of the open source projects I've been working on, just slowed down quite a bit for a while. Anyways, I plan to soon be not only working on UFO AI again, but also my own game project.
I've got a new main character model for my game, as shown in the pics, and I think it looks much better than the old, clunky one. This model has the benefit of normal-mapping technology that the old one did not have, as well as some newer modelling tricks and techniques I've learned.
I've also studied up on how to use per-pixel special maps (lighting, specular, bump/normal/tangent-mapping, etc...) in shader code, and at a glance it doesn't look much harder than some of the shader work I've already done so far.
I'm especially proud of the feathered wings in this model, which I think look much more real. There's a trick to how the wings are rendered, done with a total of less than 350 faces for both sides of both wings (They do have depth, they are not simply flat planes), yet by looking at the pictures one might guess at a glance that there would supposedly be a lot more mesh verts and faces for all the detail. Most of the edges and faces are broken up simply for the joints, so they can be animated (each side has 11 bones, 1 base connected to the character's back, and 10 for bending/flapping the wings).
I think the material for the clothing came out kinda cool, too.
I'm still doing some planning for exactly how the game will work and what it will be like, but one thing I know for sure: Much of the game's content will be generated randomly for each campaign/gaming session, so it won't be exactly the same game every time it is played, including map layouts of game areas being different every time.
As for UFO AI, I *do* plan on finally getting together some kind of air combat system in 3D, although I'm probably going to keep the first implementation rather simple and try to add to it, rather than trying to shoehorn a complex, extensive addition all at once like I had tried to do before with the code than got busy part-way through coding it.
Hope to see more of you guys around, soon, and hopefully get to know some of the newer faces in this community since the last few times I checked in to the project...
(I've been involved with UFO AI for years, a long time now, on and off...)
-Dave
