Rebek
Attention to areas of D’ni have been put on the back burner as I turn my attention to Rebek.
Rebek is a very large Age, with a lot of areas for hiding in (unsurprising given the nature of the Age) so I have spent the last month working on the landmass. The east side of the land has a lot of lava tubes that criss-cross with each other. With the initial massing model of the Age the tunnels were quick square things that needed to be expanded not only to allow the avatar and camera through but to look more “organic”.
Initially my plan was to do away with the kind of cliffs that had been developed during the massing process and made them very different. Fortunately an email from Rawa shed a little more light on Rebek and stopped me from making a mistake (the cliffs are the way they are for a reason). So I spent a few days rebuilding the cliffs to make them more like they lore stated they should be but better (at least in my opinion) than the direction established by the massing process.
The result looks pretty good with the rest of the Age, and once all the floating rocks are animated and moving it should look even better.
At the weekend I finished modeling the base landmass, everything had been vertex painted and I just need to address the UVmapping in a few areas that I had adjusted after texturing.
The next step is to lay down texturing for the grass (natural) side of Rebek as well as adding variations to the rock texturing throughout. Once that is done I can turn my attention to building up the various elements made by the natives of the Age and moving them from massing to a final mesh.
After that I shall need to add various ground clutter (grass, bushes, rocks, and so forth) and trees/large plants to most of the nature side of Rebek (with the rocks and other bits and bobs to the mineral side of the Age).
Following that collision needs to be established and the map stations will need to have their height fixed so players can’t see pass the cliffs and spot any texture/mesh cut off points.
Once that is all done we can look to game play mechanics. Rebek will require new avatar animations, a new way of handling swimming (through a three dimensional space like most 3D games handle swimming) as well as the mechanism for players to capture other players. Any other wiring and animation stuff will need to take place as well.
Of course Rebek comes with a location in D’ni, a figuring shop which is located in the canyon with the Kadish Gallery. Fortunately the shop is not a large complicated area (the main complication is getting it to fit as some of the physics of Ae’gura is like Timelord science) so shouldn’t require a lot of time to build. Currently Chloe has decided to work on this area whilst I focus on Rebek.