I have been feeling horribly lethargic, today, and my throat feels a bit strange. I was a zombie yesterday, too, but after being out until 4 AM on Saturday night, drinking, that much made sense.

So, this leads to the question I find often comes up in the winter: Am I tired and feeling rough due to: (1) day 2 of hangover, (2) getting sick, (3) still recovering from breathing all the cold air, or (4) the lack of sunlight.

Of course, the other possible answer which could also do it is not feeling motivated due to not being happy with any of the animation options for OctoberProject. The particle engine works well (I just need to make more interesting use of it), the post-delete animations are working (one needs an additional parameter to look a bit better, I think), and I am confident with my plan for predictive motion tweening (although I don't currently have enough information to do that for all objects - will need to add the missing options after next release). However, the actual creature/entity model animation will be not as fun.

Ideally, I would rig the different parts in Blender, import that as part of the data, and do the model animation in the vertex shader on the one input mesh. However, that is tricky, hard to test, and isn't supported by the data format I am exporting (not without some augmentation to deviate from the normal standard, at least). As a result, I suspect that I might just export key frames and select those for animation (potentially doing some interpolation) while I figure out how to sync up the animation with movement, initially.

Eventually, I suspect that I will need that rigged input data in order to make the animation arbitrarily fluid (a joint would be able to rotate a limb by an arbitrary angle, not just those captured in key frames) but I will likely delay that until a later release when I can figure out if there is an elegant way to capture that description (as it is more than just the rigging data).

I also want a plan for how to show head orientation animation and that might be a way to test out some of these relative movement and rigging ideas in a more restrictive context.

Other than that, there is still a lot to do and, unfortunately, none of it is in my wheel house (it is all images, models, animation, and sound). At least getting to play around with some shaders and ways of thinking about how much data is being moved to GPU memory, and how much is being used, is somewhat interesting.

...Nights