The tweaking...Not much to say. As mentioned by John Hattan the troll looked as though it had very little mass and floated when in the air. Two things were causing this. The gravity constant was somewhat modified by frame rate and the current values weren't realistic. So I found solutions to those two things and turned my attention to the camera system.
I put in place the rubber banding effect on the camera position as well as the camera look-at point. These rubber banded points are relative to actual positions defined by character movement and a set of rules for each camera. For instance the camera is at a certain vector from the character and translates along the y and x axis at a speed of 1. Which would be good for following the character upwards in a level. The 1 value means that the camera moves at 100% the speed of the character. Each axis has its own speed value. Setting all speeds to zero creates a static positioned camera which rotates to look at the character. Cameras will be setup in Max and exported to XML. I still need to test the trigger system which moves the camera between defined camera locations.
I'm also going to add some functions to the gem placement tool to make it an effective solution. This includes optionally grouping sets of gems for export. This will help in testing them in groups against the camera frustum rather than checking all of them. I'd like to add gem culling for overlapping bounding boxes into the max tool and add the ability for the user to define the intersection ray so gems can be placed relative to any axis.
The skunks...This game's going to need antagonists at some point. I think skunks will make very stinky adversaries. [smile]
Like I said, not much to say. [grin] Have a good weekend everyone!
Edit.. I forgot to mention that I added RSS to my personal site. You can find the link at the top of this page.
