Well I’ve finished up the “New Player Experience.” There are a bunch of windows to walk you through a pretty basic beginner tutorial. It’s still not much, but at least you can create popup windows from a Python script, and do a couple of other useful things. I’m just uploading a new copy of Rift now. It doesn’t come with my pre-made characters anymore, which is a pretty big step in the right direction.

I’ve spent this month working on two things. The first was pretty easy, getting it running in Linux. The last time I compiled it for Linux was about a year ago, so there was a lot of project management stuff, fussing with Eclipse, etc. It didn’t take too much in the end and the game runs in Linux. I’m not bothering with a Linux build as I doubt there’s much interest in a closed source game demo for Linux. My other main focus for the month has been making normal maps work. This actually wasn’t a huge amount for work, however it meant that I needed to re-work my models AGAIN. This time I need a very high polygon count model to generate a normal map. I spent a heck of a lot of time creating a high poly VelotekEgg ship and I have to say, I’m freaking sick of making high poly count models. The model itself is okay, but the mapping to the low poly model isn’t great, so the normal map ends up being wonky.

For this month I plan on taking a break. I’ve been going pretty full on with the model creating and I’m sick of it. What’s worse is I still have 2 more ships to do. So for now I’m just gonna step away. I’ve decided to finally play X3: Reunion. It’s a great game. I’ll get back to Rift soon enough.