New character, customization.

Thank you so much for the support this month! 

A lot of time consuming character modelling is done finally, various body variants for Hizathri species are rigged to a freshly created master-rig for all bipedal and upright standing creatures (more to come later and they will re-use the same animations) . What's finished has been added to the game and... to support all that good stuff we needed to do some big changes to customization system.

Now instead of having some hard-coded predefined bits of the character to swap around, we opened it up and made it into a great character creation tool. 

The system now is like a tree, which can turn out to be very unique for each individual species. We're not forced to have just only 4 bodyparts like we used to have (Body, Head, Hair, Spine), now it is literally limited by imagination... and computer resources. 

It also now allows to swap colors, choose alternative skins, and push around the shapes with sliders for each individual bodypart. An upgrade in all departments, it even makes things like modding in additional head shapes much easier.

When I said "bodypart" I wasn't referring to just "body" and "head" parts; this definition also includes things like horns, hair, spikes... The bodyparts are models that are attached onto their "parent" bodyparts, like hair is attached to the head, while head is attached to the body. Later on we'll even use this for clothing (the little of it we'll eventually have)

This feature is especially important, because the game focuses on building and customizing your own body, out of bits you acquire over time by doing various activities and acquiring knowldege. Kinda similar to what you'd do with your cars in a racing or vehicle simulation game.

For the next step, to bring it into the next build, we'll need to make a good convenient user interface for the customization window! Because old one kinda doesn't work anymore...

And another next step is adding animations for the characters of course, thankfully this time it will somewhat different from when we were developing the movement system - there is already a list of required animations that need to be made, research work has been done at least. The only problem is that those animations need to look beautiful, which is just an another time consuming thing to do...

PS: Remember that transition on respawn I talked about in previous posts, where character gets assembled out of molecules? Well, here a preview of that is in game, still no animations and particles, but that Hizathri definitely has all the internals in order...