Just a little progress video. As well as getting the scripting working a bit more, I've been placing villages and naming map areas. The area names are generated by putting together random chosen syllables.
Morphing
For variation with the natives they now use realtime bones like the player, and there is a morphing system so you can have fat / thin / muscular natives etc (I only have created fat and thin so far to test, but it works fine).
UV Maps
As well as the morphing variation, each native has a uv map so it can use different textures for different uv islands (parts of the body). This will allow e.g. wearing different clothing, different faces, jewellry etc. At the moment I've just just put some red green and blue and white over the different areas as placeholder until I create more textures.
The conversations are all random from script just for a test .. choosing random animals and people to make random snippets of talk. I will probably make this more purposeful, giving each villager names and relations so they can further the plot.
Next
Next up I am putting in attachments so they can carry spears etc, and the player can carry sword. Also I may be able to have a canoe as an attachment off the root nodes so they can canoe on the lakes. I will also add female natives. I could do them as morphs, but I think it will be easier for texturing etc to have a different female model.