The Floating Gun Trick!

Not a lot to report from today's efforts, having spent about six hours out the office and on the road. Did some bits this morning which ticks off one more item, but got an email with five new items based on the latest FPS demo so plenty work ahead of me.  The item in question was a pretty exciting one however, and the new weapon system allows guns that use bone and non-bone meshes in the same model. It basically means I have opened the door wider for new weapons to make it into the product via the Store, and the return of one of the great weapon smiths from FPSC Classic!  Can't wait to see what he comes up with.

In my absence Rick did identify one issue that remains buried in our default characters which is the way they hold their guns. As you can see, the pistol is not really tightly grasped. Now normally these guys are more in the distance and always moving (and shooting you) so this kind of detail can be overlooked, but it's an interesting question as to how much time we dedicate to solving this over other issues such as adding the material system, e.t.c. The good news is that if we choose to tackle it, an artist can do the work in parallel to me so it will not interfere with the coding time line.

After all that driving I am pretty zonked, so have decided on an early night and to slice off some of the weekend to catching up on some coding tasks, and sitting at the top of my list is the re-introduction of dynamic shadows for crates and characters.  Using the new glass terrain geometry, I should be able to retain good performance when adding these shadows, but time will tell. I am pretty determined to avoid the 'blob shadow' fall back as I think such effects should remain in the past :)