Success with animation

• I have had major success in getting an animated mesh that I made working in DEMII ! This is huge as it is the last major milestone/hurdle for the game engine to overcome. It opens up a world of possibilities for enemies, etc, etc. All it took was fixing the Milkshape exporter in DeleD and implementing the XNAnimation library.
  
• I am also finally happy with the camera control. After playing  researching other games (GTA4, RF:G, JC2) and trying to work out what they are doing different (GTA4's camera works well indoors for a third person game)...and copying. Now the camera orbits the player in 2 dimensions and sticks to walls. So much better than pushing it up the wall (sea sickness, anyone)?
  
• I have added a few new levels. The most interesting of which is a massive pyramid that DEMII must climb, only the steps are broken in places. So, she has to walk around the edges and find a path up. It kind of reduces the game to a platformer, which is a great bit of variety, me thinks. Think the old C64 classic Nebulus. There will be alternate paths, traps and hidden things, also....and a push puzzle on top!
  
• My recent GTA4 "research" has also given me a lot of insight into how to do missions without an inventory. Basically, when you have to "get item X", you are really telling the player "go to location X, where I will display item X". Location X can therefore be a trigger tile.
  The other major type of mission, in GTA4, is the good old bloodlock ie kill a particular enemy or all enemies in a location.
  Using combinations of these, with dialog triggers throughout, can be quite entertaining story telling. A real eye opener!
  

Animation Woes/Rant

A new version of Blender has been released 2.57. Improvements include not having an interface that looks like it was designed by an epileptic chicken, and having a plug-in interface that can actually run plug-ins, and not just say "Script Error" or "I can't find Python despite every other program using it just fine". Major downside: Old plugins don't run, and (of course) the useful ones haven't been ported over. In other words: different shit, same smell.

Which brings me back to DeleD. This free editor may not be as powerful as Blender, but it is far easier to use, and, you know what, it gets the job done. Its major flaw is that you can't get the animations you make out into the world. The only way to save the animations is in its own DXS format. The only exporter that exports animation was to Milkshape...and even then animation export was broken. I say "was", as I invested yesterday downloading the source, tracking down a copy of Delphi7, building an XP virtual machine, and fixing the exporter....then I realised it was 3AM. LOL

I can now export to Milkshape, which will allow me to export to animated .X or .FBX. Which is a stupid workflow. Why should I use an excellent, alive and free 3D tool (DeleD) then export to a so-so, not so alive, and not free 3D tool (Milkshape) just to export to a free game framework (XNA). I think a new entry on my to do list will be to get the DeleD .X exporter exporting animations. Then I can pants off Milkshape.

Anyway, I'm off to look into getting this animation into the game.