I'm taking a week off of work starting tomorrow, yay. Although I have nothing really planned for that week, its like getting a week off of school…much needed.

Will this mean I'll have more time to work on my projects? The negative side of me says nope. However I may be able to get a little more done on The Crawl, if not, maybe some more levels and improvements to Black Shadow. Its hard to tell.

The Crawl advances.

I brought back the idea of the fake shading used in the pure-gm build and was able to replicate it by simply creating simple shaded textures that get layered over the tiles existing one, creating a similar and potentially better fake shading effect.

Displayed here

I'll probably give up on the idea of bump mapping the tiles as they don't match up correctly lighting wise and it looks funky…unless I can find a way to make it work, its back to fake shading. Of course non-tile objects will still be capable of having bump mapping, as well as the clouds that were demo'd in my previous blog.

Also I played with some modeling and have the basis of a headless person model. The head will be a seperate object…maybe. And as I may have stated before, the people/monsters/blah will be cel-shaded, or at least outlined like so. Yes, he has no feet or hands yet either.

Note wise I've pretty much have the NPC system worked out, and a list of various poses that I'll have to rig the model to display. There are about 12 standing poses that the npc can use depending on personality and desposition towards the player.

One reason I decided to drop the sprite NPC idea is that it would be more difficult and time consuming to draw the NPCs in the various positions and have their clothing(which is changable) move too. Its more flexible to have the whole mess 3d.

Ultimately I really just need to get the damn mapping engine and editor done with so I can move on with the game.