I’m still can’t get out of bump-mapping thoughts. Now it’s optimized and has spotlights.

• 1/2/3 - lights on/off

As a test of 3D-engine I made the Rubik’s cube. Enjoy.

Controls:

• Click and drag — to rotate segment
• Space — to randomize

I didn’t want to start serious thing on Friday. We spent all day optimizing and refactoring code. Finally we got a demo - you can compare two lighting approaches. Textured - when lights are drawn in texture, and “faced”, when light is added to faces when drawing.

Keys:

• Spacebar — change light type
• Arrows — rotate object
• Q — change quality (I recommend to try this)

Today we made texturing and soft lighting based on automatic UV-mapping. The real deal is that you have to draw polygons only once. When you change lighting, it changes only texture, and all changes go to basic tex automatically. So we have good optimization and nice look.

Keys:

• Space — “change” surface

Next demo shows how this automatic UV-mapping is trying to align texture along the surface.

Keys:

• Arrows — rotate object

Sadly, because of new mip-mapping feature in new Flash player alpha, lightmap may dissapear. In this case you can use newest ”release” player.

Newspaper is a voice of administration and the great possibility to get to know some latest news. You can buy it on the corner. You can find it on a street (but it is not the latest issue for sure). It has articles and pics. Everyone can become a newswriter, and aven get some in-game money by creating an interesting article

(!) Spoiler: powerful players can create their own newspaper. They will need money, a place to print it, and some administration connections, of course. As usual.

Behind this strange words the classic problem — how correctly to assign a texture on a three-dimensional surface. For each three-dimensional point of object are set bidimentional — in texture coordinates system which named U (horisontal) and V (vertical). In any 3D modelling software there are various tools for the instruction of UV-coordinates.

Initially we planned to create all objects in 3DStudio MAX and convert in an internal format further. Even had time to develop this format and write the exporter. As a result we have decided to completely refuse from foreign 3D modelling software and to create the Flash-editor directly inside of game.

So, all 3D-models in game can cange dynamically at any time, therefore the human control of UV-coordinates is not real absolutely. Therefore UV-coordinates should calculate automatically. Also automapping is the important part on soft and fast illumination of objects.

Today we realized it:

Controls:

• Up/Down/Left/Right — to rotate object
• Space — to distort object

We pay great attention to 3d-sprites. This is a number of object’s pics from different views. We will talk later about choosing the right phase, but now lets have a look at lighting issues.

The problem is that sprites don’t have any “volume” and geometry, and they have to take part in scene lighting process. Anyway, we can enlighten all the sprite, and it still gives nice effect.

If the light is between camera and sprite, is lights the whole sprite, otherwise it doesn’t. And - we have to be sure about color, power and attenuation.

In this post, dear reader, I would like to tell you about game GUI. It was re-made a few times, and this one is the most simple and functional.

On the right there is a quicklaunch bar. It may contain not only objects, but actions too (this is useful when action if not the basic for an object). It may also contain avatar actions and gestures.

At the bottom there is a chat-panel which may change its height. The text is colored according the relationship level for each player (you set it manually) + it may have an icon (corporate, gang, etc…) You can whisper, say and scream. There is no private rooms. If you want to talk privately - go in a quiet place and whisper (out of other player’s “hearing radius”).

On the left there are 3 icons: emotions (they shows above an avatar), ”emoactions” (kinda gestures), and health (overall ratio on a button and precise data after a click). Then goes inventory button with weight bar on it.

At the beginning we all decided to choose something simple and re-usable, like Nike. No glamour, no metall highlights, no gothic elements.

We had a lots of signs, and each other was too simple. Then we gave up and stopped on this logo:

Then registration process has began, and we decided to make some (read: everything) changes. We came up with this one:

Is is still in progress, but we have the basics anyway.

I have found this central area sketch.