Dragon creator status update & ETA

This week I'll talk about where the dragon creator is currently at and when it will hopefully be ready for download. There has been a lot of progress since the last showcase, both new features and improvements to what has already been shown.

In terms of visuals, we have finished a new base head and a new legged upper body variant with a more classic western dragon look, improved the torso and tail length adjustments method along with various visual improvements in the dragon geometry and textures, and more. One thing that has taken a lot longer to perfect than expected is ensuring the dragon deforms nicely when animating and posing, because many different body parts with different proportions need to come together and work seamlessly across all possible combinations. This is something I've spent a lot of time on lately, but now it is very close to being done. I've also laid the groundwork for the posing system so that it can be implemented with relative ease once the deformations are fully done. Another important thing in the visual department is coloring the dragon, which is still in a more experimental phase that I might talk about next week.

For the UI, we have sketched the high level layout and flow for navigating the creator, and then worked on an interface that lets you hover over different regions of the dragon body to highlight and interact with it, plus tools to automate the region authoring process. This is used both for manipulating head/body morphs by clicking and dragging on regions highlighting the morph area, and also for selecting and swapping entire body sections, like choosing a new pair of wings or spikes for the neck. The goal is to minimize the amount of menus and sliders to make the creation process feel more natural and intuitive.

For the system itself, there has been a big switch to splitting it into two versions, one that is optimized for editing speed, and one that is optimized for performance. We felt that certain interactive features such as morphing didn't feel smooth enough due to some heavy calculations going on behind the scenes when generating the new dragon shapes, so the decision was made to use a lighter version while editing the dragon, which looks visually identical but isn't as optimized, and then use the heavier version at the end of editing to create the final optimized dragon. Another feature that has been worked on is being able to save, load and share dragons, which should be straightforward once the full dragon parameter specification is done at the very end.

As for the release date, there's still quite a lot left to do until it is ready as a comprehensive experience because we are aiming for a high level of polish and a relatively complete feature set, so that future updates can focus on just adding more content to it instead of expanding the functionality, letting me move on to other important things. A target I mentioned in a previous post was to get it out the door before the end of the year, but I don't think that will be doable without rushing it and taking shortcuts. Instead, I'll set a preliminary date to January 31st, which happens to be the anniversary for the very first EA build!