Portrait frames again, plus some other stuff.

I forgot to bring home the latest copy of GC from work, and I made enough significant changes that I don't really want to do anything much tonight. I really should set up a repository somewhere so that I don't have to keep copying GC to a flash drive every morning before work and every afternoon before coming home. It's a pain, and sooner or later it's going to bite me in the ass. So tonight I raked a bunch of leaves from last fall out from under my lilac bushes, then fired up Blender and just sort of farted around with the portrait frames and life bars. Came up with this concept:



It's sort of grim, if you really look at it. Those are goblin heads. Severed goblin heads, sitting on wooden shelves. The life/energy bars are something I have thought of before, nothing really innovative there, but it's unlikely I will go with that unless I can figure out a better way of doing a glass bottle overlay in Blender. Anyone have any tips?

I have been putting some thought into fleshing out the graphics sets, as you can see by that experimental brick block. Mostly, I've been thinking and playing around in Blender.

In a way, I've made my life a bit harder by switching to hex, at least as far as graphics are concerned. When doing standard isometric graphics, you only have to worry about making them tile in 4 directions, at least as far as walls and such are concerned. Hex adds the additional complexity of two more directions, and makes it more difficult to do squares. So I'm thinking about taking the hex idea and just running with it, making every architectural structure based upon hexes. Hexagon or triangular rooms and buildings, hexagonal towers, hexagonal mountains, etc... I've got decent templates for isometric graphics, as well as plenty of scripts for doing processing, but I'll have to rewrite all that stuff for the hex basis.

I also need to think about lighting and shadows. Right now, I'm using a generic shadow texture for just about everything, which is adequate for the mobs but not so much for the architectural pieces. Also, I want to have caves/dungeons, and those need to be dark and torch-lit, and the new backend doesn't have any of the lighting code installed. In fact, the switch to a hex basis has complicated that aspect of it, as well.

Anyway, that's what I'm up to. Procrastinating the task of fleshing out the combat and character stats system some more, mostly. You know. The usual.