Rendering and Some New Animations

So this morning was a direct follow-on from last night where I was having conniptions with the way the wolves were rendering. I made a quick edit, but turns out I was really tired last night. When I was checking the database to make sure the data coming from it was correct, then going through hundreds of lines of code.... I checked the database for the wrong ID. So no, the data there wasn't correct. And then all the following places were propagating the data as they should until it hit the rendering engine where it was coming out wonky.

So today was a bunch of creating new animations, then also further follow-up rendering code tweaks to get encounters rendering to the right size when they were now in combat. I've discovered two bugs that I'm not overly happy with when I dropped in some new undead creatures - and some good things.

Good things first. My editor worked perfectly. I was able to import and create the two new animations (a smaller skeleton with a shield and spear, and a bigger skeleton with a sword and some wicked moves) with clean and smooth efficiency. Secondly, the game just picked them up off the server as needed and went to town using all the assets without skipping a beat. *chefs kiss - mwaaa*

Now to the annoying. It seems that encounters aren't rendering quite as they should. The assets I have should be nice and smoothly centered, but when the creature changes facing, or action, the place it is rendered to does jump about - meaning I don't think it's quite rendering properly using all the offsets just right. More play with that tomorrow.

Second annoying bug is that when the new animations are loaded up, the game does hang for a second or two. So clearly something is happening on the wrong threads. Interestingly, it's not the rendering thread - that happily keeps the animations and such going perfectly well while nothing moves or happens. So I'm hoping it's going to be as simple as calling a method via a reference of a thread rather than as a static call.

Oh. There's one more bug - 'cause of course there is - where some of the encounters are jerking about as the player moves, so I may need to change the way they're referenced in the world to connect them to the world below rather than as an arbitrary reference that merely is aware of the ground below them.

Anyhow, here's the party wandering about the Blighted Isle and running into some of the new skeletons in the form of the rather weak Dusty Skeletons.