Thank Cliff for the title.

Since the last update on the game I’ve mostly been busy working on trying to furnish my algorithmically generated level layouts with, well furniture. I’ve bashed together one set of xml files that attempts to roughly outline what kind of rooms a type of location might have in it. Then I conjured up a second set that describes, for each type of room, what kind of furniture might be in it.

Of course to have any furniture to place in the levels meant I had to model and texture some up at last. So Free Company got a whole bunch of exciting new furniture assets recently; like plates and clay pots! The furniture models have to be all tagged up with meta data in a shiny new tool that I think I mentioned I was starting work on last time. It’s forked from the model viewer and is still evolving as I think of more useful ways to describe furniture to the game. Right now it looks like this:

That’s the ghostly Table O’ Doom asset you can see there.

The whole furnishing system is still pretty primitive, and still has some very obvious bugs but it’s coming along. Here is what it thinks a ‘dining room’ might look like right now:

If you peer closely into the gloom you can probably make out the bug where chairs/stools are completely ignored by the placement system.

Other than that I also managed to fit in some time to fiddle about with Bullet Physics, which is something I’m now looking to to replace ODE with to better cater for Free Company’s physics needs. As you might have guessed from the title I was experimenting with ragdolls and after lots of brain teasing work I was able to get something that is just about acceptable or at least doesn’t feature the model warping all over the screen or shrinking into nightmarish ball. Of course it’s impossible to demonstrate physics in a screen shot so I’ve just wrestled with Fraps and Windows Movie Maker and you this delightful film:

It’s probably worth watching just to hear a nice little bit of music from that all round good guy and friend of the Shed; Sam.