Sanctimonia: Improved Graphics, Among Other Things

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Kevin Fishburne’s website is down right now, so you can’t see the image associated with this tweet:

Nor can you access his December progress report at present:

Similarly, the image here is denied to you:

However, here is some idea of what he has been up to of late:

Essentially, in addition to overhauling the actual architectural GUI within Sanctimonia, Kevin has revisited his block persistent world object assets, and has been remaking these in Blender. This video showcases some of his early work in this respect:

And here’s things in their more-or-less current state:

This achieves two things: the game looks sharper, and its architectural system has become significantly more flexible. And, as always, Kevin’s ability to make these changes almost “on the fly” continues to impress.

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1 Response

  1. Sanctimonia says:
    January 11, 2014 at 1:51 am

    Yes, it has been a most glorious week. My RAID5 went down again, and in the midst of struggling to fix that I accidentally shift-deleted my home directory on my workstation, mistakenly thinking I was in the trash bin. The last time I had a week this bad I was facing felony drug charges (ah, my misguided youth).

    I just got (knock on wood) my server back up again (RAID nukeage, OS reinstall, web, email, file share and data restoration) and am still in the process of putting everything back just in place. Sadly due to having the Sanctimonia web site directory in an illogical location I think I may have lost a few of those images I tweeted at the top of your article. No great loss, as Stephen King would say.

    All weeping and gnashing of teeth aside, I’ve adjusted my strategy and priorities for the time, and with a good reason. I’m leaving system creation and expansion by the wayside and focusing on creating modeled assets, particularly for architectural design. To support this I’m expanding the collision system so that players may properly interact with the block PWOs (architectural objects), such as climbing stairs, walking on walls, jumping on on ledges, etc. I’m on the verge of implementing multiple layers of collision, one stacked upon the next, which will result in multiple story structures. This will first require that each collision layer support not just the collision height, but the starting elevation (think of an archway where a player may walk both beneath and across it).

    I’ll also be implementing modeled players rather than 2D images, which in the end will make gear rendering infinitely easier. The character portrait composition will stay, but will be texture mapped to polygonal heads and use polygonal hair.

    Thanks WtF for the writeup. I’ll keep everyone in the loop as things progress, as always.