I think the most horrible thing about using 3D modelling tools (apart from my chronic lack of artistic ability), is the fact that they all have different control interfaces. The functionality is pretty much the same in every tool, but it takes so long to learn any tool to the point of being comfortable enough to build anything with it, that you end up sticking with the same tool just because you don’t want to learn another. Admittedly most of my work the last few days has been with the free tools, which obviously haven’t had the tens of thousands of pounds spent developing and refining their UI, but its still a slog.

All I really want to do at the moment is build a mock-up of the Station Assault level so I can use it as a base for future development. After a lot of experimentation with the Torque engine, it seems really quite flexible, and certainly capable of doing what we need functionality-wise. Of course, I’ve still to get any of my own assets into the system, so it may still fall down on that, but I’m confident.

Once the basic project structure and a demo level is in place, I’ll be in a position (finally) to come up with some kind of task list/development strategy for the demo, and things will hopefully move along more smoothly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 9:50 am and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.