Times they are a changin’….Chaos never looked so good.

Well its been a fun filled month updating Convenient Chaos’ models to the new ones provided by our project’s talented modeler.  Early in the month we dove into importing the new level and fixture models, and I had some limited success.  For some reason we experienced heavy problems with model exports from Blender and axis direction not orienting correctly.  If your pivot point is not aligned correctly, bad things happen.  Fast.   Mix that with a lack of modeling experience *cough* Mesh Connections *cough*, certain elements don’t become oriented correctly because the parent isn’t (blender_root box), and you have a REAL frustrated coder trying to get his code to function with some beautiful pieces of art.

I’ve not developed much in 3D prior to Convenient Chaos, but knew a lot about it from schooling and reading different books.  So development hasn’t been hindered, however one thing I did not learn was much about was model file format of  FBX.  This was a hindrance.  I’ve had limited success with different modeling programs that fit within the budget of a small Indie studio.   So it was off to the root cause, how are my models being exported exactly.  After understanding the orientation format of FBX (ASCII) and the general layout of the file (thanks Autodesk FBX SDK), Mixed in with pre-processing rotation in the ContentManager, the models were imported beautifully! Then had to scale the models, avatars, collision/pathing manager to the size of the new (bigger) store.

Was all the frustration worth it?  You tell me…

Shopping In Chaos

Granted the transparencies have yet to be set, but I’m totally digging the new eye candy.  The game level still is not completely modeled, however the final version should be up soon.  (What are those orange boxes in the picture you say? New addition: Avatars also now have an action icon above their head with what action the shopper is preforming.  This should hopefully avoid some confusion when the store becomes packed.)

So whats next on the list?  Well I have been working on balancing game play.  The game is designed to be fun, intuitive, and to have a balanced difficulty curve that should appeal to most.  But we will discuss more of that in my next post…