The break, and our character editor

We're now officially on our Mid-Session Recess (woohoo!) and this week we're working on the user manual. I've done my part already (although I should help out more since I didn't take the biggest slice of work) so I'm starting to develop our character creator/editor/animator program which as a whole is being named "Modeller"--because a character, including their name, skeletal structure, sprites, animation definitions and etc., are called "Character Models" in this project. This way we can drag and drop these models into our game and have everything ready rather than loading up a skeleton from here, motion data from here, applying sprites from this file, etc., which is just ugly and unnecessary.

Modeller, in its early stages.

So far I've designed a bunch of UI widgets as you can see from the screenshot which are all done entirely in XNA with draw calls (object oriented, of course.) So far there is little functionality but the next step forward will be to make the skeleton editor which allows the user to create the skeletal structure of the character.

The reason I'm creating this editor is to make it infinitely easier for us later to create and customise our characters: no need to create every value by hand. And because we plan on having at least three different characters with different fighting styles and different body structures, a visual editor will make it possible to faithfully recreate the characters movements from our mind's eye.

That it from me for now!