Thanks for the suggestions on the look of the game! I’ve taken them to heart and I’m hoping to have a new screenshot soon with a real model in it.
I’ve taken one more look at the asset creation question. A friend of mine suggested trying out Milkshape (a shareware Win32 3D editor, mostly famous for the eye-popping number of different file formats it supports) and to my surprise it didn’t make me want to kill myself like all other 3D modelers, so this just might be the tool I use. Today I wrote an importer for the game itself, using the nicely human-readable .X format that Microsoft came up with around DirectX 8.0 or so. The screenshot above is of the basic test object I used to get the importer functional.
Also, it’s hopefully lit correctly, unlike the earlier 3D models. I’d rather not go into it right now, but there was a lot of screaming involved getting all the lighting calculation into the same space and frankly I’m still not sure it’s right. It doesn’t help that there isn’t even one complete example anywhere on the Internet of doing directional lighting in a shader without using OpenGL’s built-in fixed-function light sources. Yeah, I was shocked too!
