It's been some time since the last update, and there are great news.

For new people, this refers to devlog of my MMORPG, which you can see here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyOt8sPTqNxRseUzpzUEQQg

I have been working on adding human male and female models, along with animations and equipping items.

After I got the human models, I had to setup animations. An important aspect of animating the characters is blending different animations together. For example, attack with a sword while running, or casting a spell while jumping. So I implemented a way to seamlessly transition the animations, so if I am attacking and I start running, or stop running, it will respectively start the running animation on the legs, or return the full attack animation to the full body. It does has it's drawbacks, but it looks a bit better than the other options I explored.

Then another major milestone that I have been moving towards is equipment. There are a few challenges to solve with equipment.

To start, I need to be able to tell what a character looks like and what is it wearing when it loads on a client, so the client can reproduce it. Recreating a character requires to merge different textures and attach different meshes to character, so it's not a very lightweight event. Because of that, I am having NPCs textures "baked" for the clients, so in runtime it is cheaper to load a given NPCs texture and armor. For the players I can keep a cache perhaps, and that might help to reduce the amount of processing required to recreate a character, but I have yet to implement this.

A few screenshots of the latest work: