Cell Dynamic Sky System 2

The other day I was talking about a dynamic sky system. It would act like the sky by changing its properties as the day goes by. I tried importing the simple sky system I had the other day into AS3D. It's still buggy, but you can see below that it did actually happen. I'm no longer using the crutch of setting the background color.
Dynamic Sky in Cell

I have a sphere (just like the Blender rendering) setting the color by material. I can change the color and the texture of the sphere. Then in front of it I have a smaller sphere which is transparent that draws the clouds. It's obvious that this is a huge waste of transparent pixels. Yet, it seems that clouds are important enough that I should give maybe a few fps for them to be properly rendered. The idea is that hopefully I can change the color and makeup of the sky over time from Python. I'll be able to do stars, constellations, as well as clouds and stars. It's also possible that I can change the position of the clouds over time using matrix rotation.

Why am I working on the clouds when the buildings and the characters aren't built yet? I've been in a nearly perpetual slump for years now. I've gotten a few days work done here and there. It's become clear that getting this game done requires more than just design. Implementation is crucial to any development process. When the process is in a position where it can be rejected, put off for years, or cancelled, it's important to keep working on small things while the large and difficult things are not getting done. Of course, finding out why the large things aren't getting done might be a good task.

Why aren't the characters being modeled? You might notice that I have three characters just barely working from Hack Mars. The timing on that wasn't very good. I finally got those models working when I stopped using Windows as my main platform. Milkshape3D is what I used to model them. So spending time on other things not in Windows for years, I found that even booting up was a major pain. What's wrong with Windows? It acts awful. The user interface is so improper that it's quite frustrating to use. Milkshape3D isn't very hard to use, but trying to make models and animations are difficult for a novice. Combined with Windows, modeling in MS3D is a very time consuming, unrewarding process. For quite a while I didn't have my key for MS3D, so I couldn't even use it. I finally got my key from Mete, so I can open it up for stuff. In the meantime the alternative to MS3D has been beaconing to me.

Blender is a 3D program which is multiplatform. The problem with Blender is mainly that the interface takes weeks to learn and is unintuitive compared to MS3D. The second major problem with Blender is import and export. It cannot import or export MS3D files. I finally wrote an import/export for my file format, but it only does static models because the armature code is so difficult. I think I'm actually just about 6 hours from finishing import to Blender. Export is going to be a massive effort, though. It isn't designed like MS3D at all, so I'm pretty much coding whatever looks right.

You can see that three static models have been created in Blender and imported into AS3D (streets, mountains, and sky), but none of them are as far along as they should be and the export code is still very buggy. At least it's Python and not something strange or C/C++ plugins. I'll post my Blender import/export script when it's working a bit better. It won't be use to anyone until I release HM/Cell's source code. I might be able to make a MS3D import/export script since my format is similar to MS3D.

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