Everything is different tonight. The models are a new reduced poly count version, though the textures have been revamped to compensate for that. Simone has worked wonders with the modeling in spite of neither of us knowing the limitations of the work space when we started.
So, where do that leave us? In a lot better shape then last week, actually. By cutting the polygon count by more then half, we've gained a lot of speed. The Boids weigh in under 500 polys each, which is still pretty massive, but they are flying.
The background needs . . . something. The physical shape of the display leads me to think they are swimming, not flying. So, an aqua tinted fog would be ideal. Using Papervision's Fog Filter has proven more difficult then we had hopped. For some reason, it just 'dies'. No trace output, no readable error message. It just stalls, pegging the CPU at 100% and over 1 gig of ram used. Not good at all. I suspect it's because of the large polygon count, as most of the demos I've seen are pretty simple. Instead, we are going to have the image mirror the display. The next detail to be added is a tunnel that the boids are living in. Hopefully, the background will provide some depth to the display, and give some better visual ques to the viewer. The lighting illusion the textures give should help as well.
After that, all that's left is the motion tracking and the sound track. Thankfully, that code is what I spent last term working on, so there is a lot of copy/paste action to be done.
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