What's the first change you'd do to an empty-headed character such as Testy? Why, chop some bits off, change his sex and get him naked at least, even transparent at that, since he's pretty much just as tedious and boring as all children dolls ¹. Of course the first attempts failed to produce anything visible because it turns out that using Cal3D sprites in Eulora's client goes through several layers of inmisdirection: Crystal Space (CS) wraps the Cal3D code in its own SprCal3D plugins and factories and whatnots; on top of that, there is also the rather elusive Cel (Crystal Entity Layer) that is meant to be a game-specific part of CS keeping track of game entities; and messing within and across all is Planeshift's (PS) own GEM concoction interlaced with delayed loaders and Dead-Reckonings² and cloning of materials (why? no idea yet) and surprising, undocumented transformations. Still, after a while of hacking through all the above, I could at least get some parts of Testy showing... if lying down rather than upright:

Spot the bottom in the grass!

The prostrate position makes at least sense in that "movement" also looks a bit like some swimming look-alike: parting the legs and advancing sort of thing. Then again, it turns out that using a different model (e.g. Cally) makes it even more interesting - the model is upright when waiting but it dives straight back to the horizontal as part of moving and it furthermore cares not one bit for whatever movement animation one loads. So there's a clue for another day - current movement needs a good bashing over the head and a deep dive to figure out what's all this nonsense. But until then, here's naked Cally who borrowed Testy's skin for a spell:

What bits is she missing?

Anyway, since position of the model is always a matter of applying one transformation or another, I went ahead and applied the obvious transformation, 90 degrees and upsy daisy on her feet:

Upsy-Daisy with muddy skin!

And funnily enough, once the 90 degrees rotation is applied to the factory (i.e. presumably to ALL entities built out of that factory) the Testy model remains upright even during movement without any perceived change. On the other hand, the Cally model is upright without the 90 degrees rotation but nevertheless dives down for movement and pops back up as soon as movement is done. So it would seem that movement has its own assumptions that it doesn't bother to make public, how lovely. Seeing how it's most probably to do with the model's initial position or similar, I might even need to end up again with the full environment, Blender and all installed to get to the bottom of it and probably see exactly what or how the exporter is also broken and specific. Such joys to come but for the moment they are not yet here since the more pressing need is first of all to disentangle some more the PS+CEL+CS+CAL3D mess regarding animated entities so as to actually be able to *use* the walk/fight/move animations rather than just "add" them and moreover to be able to add and remove on the fly as many and as diverse entities as wanted, beyond the "main character" guy. And all this is getting deeper into PS swamps so it's likely to take more than a week indeed - ideally by then I'll be able to cut off at least some parts of the existing code (precaching and preloading especially) and lighten the client start a bit if nothing more.

1. Changing graphics is this exercise in tediousness and pointlessness, it eerily reminds me of playing with dolls, just one step lower than that since those are just images of dolls, fancy that. And playing with dolls was utterly boring even when I was 5! It's like an endurance test along the lines of watching paint dry. Tinker with this and tinker with that, all for "the looks" of it and can't even satisfyingly throw it at anything to hear it break. ↩

2. Not kidding, although it's way less exciting than the name they had the chance to land on: it's mainly looking to see if your character falls down and breaks their neck. ↩

Category: Coding, Eulora

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