Not sure how that heading might me pronounced. A long and tiring day, have been working on Taskforce since about 7am, despite, last night, thinking that a lot had been done; a deadly assumption!
I thought it would idea to actually have 12 Taskforce unit models, one per team member. This was always the plan, at least, it was when there were six units; they were supposed to have individual looks and personalities. So today I started be doubling up the models and the textures. This wasn't as seamless as I'd hoped, the vertex buffer ran out of space. The models take up 2,723,120 bytes exactly of vertex data. The vast majority is the units/characters. Everything else; the icons, scenery, bullets, weapons etc. takes up only about 20% of the total space. So, I increased this.
I'm not sure if there is a limit... if so, I might have breached it, as it is now beyond 65536*32, which was, in my code, touted as a maximum. I had better test this.
I've spent most of the day working on faces and characters for these twelve heroes. Here is an example of the Kent Rickman portrait:
Compare this with the same character from the 1996 Amiga version of Taskforce, in the top left hand corner here, back when I was a mere beginner:
The level of detail for these faces might seem excessive, but it's all needed for certain aspects of the game. You never know when something will be needed for box artwork or some future cut-scene. It doesn't hurt to be over cautious with resolution.
Here are the final dozen: six male, six female:
From top left to bottom right they are Mackintosh McQuaid (inspired by the Carl Weathers character in Predator), Susan West (a fairly generic character), Kent Rickman (as above), Sunshine Price (something of a glamour puss), John Tyler (with eyepatch, also inspired by the 1996 Taskforce), Beverley Santana (with a Frida Kahlo monobrow), Elaine Kelly (with auburn hair and freckles), Luke Gemini (a playboy with panaché, I was thinking of something like D'artagnan or Face from the A-Team for him), Charlotte Gilmore (complete with blue hair), Cameron Kane (with wode face-paint, like Mel Gibson in Braveheart), Natasha Vetrova (a sort of inverse to 'Stripe' from Gremlins), and Nick Logan with Matrix-style pince-nez.
After those designs, lots of checking and texting. I played through one of the missions, and fortunately it had a few map problems, just a few things that needed improvement, so I fixed those and then checked every map in the game. I found one faulty tile (which has been there since the 2004 version) and a few other minor map problems.
I'm now so tired that my head is spinning. Perhaps, again, I can call today finished, and call most of Taskforce finished, but there is still a lot to do.
Oh, I forgot to mention that another thing I've done is compile the videos for the special ArtSwarm show; it was the deadline today. For the first time ever, I have no time or energy to create something myself. I will film and assemble this tomorrow.
