An odd day. I decided to experiment with improving the Taskforce graphics, and after very quickly revising the manual started work on possible new face textures. Perhaps the biggest graphical weakness in the game are the soldiers, and their faces in particular. Here's an existing texture:
This was partly an homage to the original Amiga Taskforce. I wanted a sort of cartoon look. Today I started work on a much more realistic option, so I've made a sort of e-fit of face parts. Here are two examples:
Amazingly, in the game, they don't really look that different. One problem is the actual texturing process, wrapping those images onto the 3D objects. I've always used my own software, Hector, for this. It's very basic (actually it is written in BASIC too), but it's all I have, and other texture programs seem horribly inefficient by comparison. I could do with one but have no experience of using any and those complicated beasts tend to take days, weeks, months to learn.
I think I'll continue experimenting for a few days, with textures, with models. This is time consuming, and I don't want to waste too long on it, but these early results look so much better than the 2004 ones, so I might as well give it a week of work and see what I can come up with.
In other news, it was a shopping trip day under the Covid-19 lockdown. Tesco has almost all sort of stock now, to at least some extent. They even had pasta and bread flour. There were not many shoppers. I've no idea how dangerous the situation is. Most of the reported figures are probably from people who were infected weeks ago. I expect it is safer now than two weeks ago, despite the figures being a lot higher now. I expect that the graph of infections will level off in 9 days and then decline.
Cat is ill today with a bad stomach, and has only eaten a little, but has drank a lot of water. I hope this is a temporary upset due to eating something she shouldn't have and not a sign of kidney failure, which affects many older cats.
I miss Deb. This lockdown situation, and the programming, has set me in a mood and mode of my pre-art days, not a pleasant mode. It wasn't productive either, it appears, because the quality of my work over those years and decades was poor; but then isn't that the case for any student?
A tiny bit of art news is that I've proofed Synaesthesia now, and it is complete; the album is ready to file and then release. I'm not sure when this will happen. I guess that it should happen before the Animalia remaster, but not too soon because the new and special Burn of God needs a few months in the spotlight.
