Just an update on my progress over the past few weeks. I have implemented texture selection to the character selection gui. Players can now select both a clothing type, and a texture from a list. The game now also supports texture layers, which mean you can have several textures blended together, for example, a base skin texture with a face texure overlayed on top of it. This is vital for my project, because it allows players to choose a texture, and then change the colour of a specific layer of that texture, independent of the other layers. For example, a player could change their avatars skin colour without distorting their face texture, or add a decal, such as a logo, onto a jacket without changing the base texture or colour of the jacket. It's quite useful.

However, I did run into a problem getting dynamic colours to work over the internet. It turns out that in TGEA, materials (basically, texture information) are treated per-asset, not per object. What this means is that a material applied (or "mapped") to a texture, and then shared by all objects (avatars) that use that texture. This is normally fine, but what happens when two objects want a different colour for the same texture? (For example, two players want a different skin colour) This cant happen with standard materials, because there is only ONE material, if one player changes it's colour, that new colour is applied to every single other player in the game.

So I need a way to make colour changes per-object, rather than per-asset. I made some progress in that area, but I'm still not there yet. I may have to compromise, and implement a simpler colour selection system than the one I had envisaged, at least for the time being.

I also finished the modelling of the Female avatar: (Click for full size)



She's not rigged or animated yet, but that should be taken care of soon enough.
I still have to prepare some textures for the game, build a level, and then debug it. I'm relatively close to having something worthy of turning into a demo. I'm not sure if I will upload it, or wait until it's a little further along, that remains to be seen.