Callisto - December 18th Update

Have been spending the bulk of this work working on the pole dancing animations. In order to ensure that I am not heading down a dead end, I rendered and encoded one of the dance animations including transparency. Following this, I implemented into the game, through a very minor tweak to the code. Whilst the system is the same as that used for the salvage and weapons training animations I wanted to make sure. In game screen shot below taken mid animation.

I have given some thought to the amount of disk space required to store the dance animations. Whilst the strip club is an important part of the game, I didn't want it to dominate the total game file size. This has seen me revise the animation length and varieties slightly. Hence I will be doing 2 looping routines per dancer each of roughly 40 second length. This will take around 200mb of disk space to store the animations. As a result, the number of segments animated from scratch is going to be reduced from 6 to 4. Whilst this reduces the variety somewhat, it should allow me to finish the animation posing this month (2 of 4 animation segments already complete).

A couple of other things in the pipeline is to establish sets for the next update. This includes a new location nominally called the 'Sanctuary', which will appear in the next update. A sample day and night image below.

Another item that has seen some attention this week is to redesign the intro. Feedback of the current intro, suggests it may contain too many spoilers and not really indicate the initial structure of the game. Often when you are creating a game and immersed in the middle, you lose perspective. As such, one of the development team is undertaking the rewrite.

As another interesting aside, I thought you may be interested in knowing that the game sector names aren't fictitious. The three sectors are located in relatively close proximity to Earth in our sector of the Milky Way. More specifically they are Messier objects M42, M44 and M45. In line with this, I did a slightly fictitious mock-up for the game as below.

Thanks for your support,

Xav