Plan for Ted Southard

My last .plan talked about the AI functionality I was working on for the game, and since then I've planned out a few adjustments for the 4th generation of the AI that I'm working on. Mostly, I'm looking at an accurate emotional model that I can use to model more complex emotions. I could add layers to it going in both directions, with more "pure" emotions and added layers of complex emotions, but that would only be something to do from a research standpoint. So as it stands, I'm trying to hold the line between accuracy and too much complexity, too much of either meaning less fun in the game. This next test of the AI/AE solution will tell me better if I'm on the right path.

For the rest of the game, I've finally sorted out a problem with the shortcut bar, where the player can use up and down buttons to scroll through their inventory. It's a terrible hack because the database keeps returning -1 rows in my query results, but it works for now. Eventually, it'll have to be fixed though, because it's slow, and it can be optimized to return only the data it needs instead of the data for the whole inventory now. In any event, it's nice to see the inventory icons scroll :) Next is saving the rearrangement of the items and setting up the actions that they can perform. That's a doozy since "improvised tools" is something I want to pull off in the game.

Another thing I started working on was something I haven't found much information on yet: DTS morphing. For the character customization screen, the player needs to be able to change the physical characteristics of their characters using sliders. Things like height, weight, jaw, nose, etc., would be controlled like that, providing a way to create unique characters. That characer model would then be saved to disk, or have it's attributes saved to the server to be retrieved upon the player's login.

To that end, I'm intending to implement some "target morphing" to the characters, using a "neutral" model and several "targets" that represent each different attribute of the model's geometry. As the player moves the slider, the neutral model is influenced more or less by the morph target, modifying it's geometry and changing it. When the player is satisfied, he/she can save the model to disk, and/or the server, making it persistent and retrievable. Another option(to keep the data transfer lighter) is to have only the procedural representation of the model saved to the server, so that when the player logs in, that data can be transmitted to the client and the client can build the model using those parameters.

So far, I'm digging around in the mesh classes, mainly crashing TGE with the little test function I'm inserting at different points. Once I find where/how to get at the data, the rest should be a piece of cake. And moving beyond the main goal of character customization, but it also opens up for realtime deformation effects and other things that can benefit from manipulation of the mesh vertices. Can someone say "Code Pack"? ;) Of course, how many people would actually need this kind of functionality?

And lastly, the next build of mapExporter is being rebuilt, as it was almost ready for primetime last month when the dev machine's HD took a dive, and I intend to get it out the door by December. A bug fix or two, more light entity support, and support for triangulated "polysoup" objects is in the works. Also, I'm going to try and get the brush tagging functions to tag every object in a group, as well as put a "detag" function in there as well, to make it easier to undo mistakes.