Always the implementation

It gets me every time. I'll estimate out how long something will take me and then 80-90% of it will go smoothly and I'll cruise along. Then that last 10-20% ends up taking way longer than I expect it to. So that's what I've been doing the past few days. Tying up loose ends and implementing things in game. Such as...

Character Editor Polish
Organized things a bit better, have all the HSV sliders updated to the fancier sliders, added sounds to most of the buttons, updated the eyebrow selection slider.

Character Origins, Attributes, and Skills
These got a bit of work and I'll continue iterating on them in the future too. This current iteration was hooking up the character origin to change the character's attributes and skills. For now I'm going to give the player a default and a buffed character origin on the road to Redtree. The buffed version will give the player higher attributes and skills if they want to test the difference.
I'm still debating if the skill and attributes should be tied to the character origin, reputations, and starting location though.

Attributes and Skills checks in game
I have attributes and skills hooked up to 1 handed and 2 handed melee weapons, ranged weapons, and dialogue speech checks. For example 1 handed weapons will deal get a damage boost from a high 1 handed skill level as well as from the character having a higher than average strength attribute.
- This is separate from the perk tree stuff (which I'll be hooking up later) and will be similar to Skyrim. Once the player has enough points in a skill then they'll be able to unlock perks that will let them specialize that skill path more. As an example with 1 handed weapons if they want to specialize in swords, axes, or clubs.
- While I was setting up the ranged weapon skill check I also hooked up ranged projectile weapons to use the damage properties from the equipped ammo slot. Which means using different arrows can deal different damages and have differing effects - being explosive, dealing elemental damage, dealing lust damage, etc. I still need to make some proper assets for those though. For this next build there's just going to be the basic bow and basic arrows set.

Eyebrows!!!
New textures are in, the character creation slider is hooked up, new values are assigned, and I went back to all the existing human NPCs and updated their eyebrow slot to the new values. If in the upcoming build you load up an old save file and the eyebrows look weird then it's because of this update. The easiest thing to do is probably export that character, then go through character creation and import them, you'll lose any in game progress but your character will have fixed eyebrows! The good news is that I shouldn't have to touch this value again because I have a bunch of "blank" eyebrow slots to support any future eyebrow textures.

And lastly some quick optimization stuff. Trying to track down the nastier hitching as the player walks around Redtree. I think I found the biggest one as my last few tests seem to be smoother. We'll see how it performs after the HLODs and a full build though.

Alright, back to work. I've got these animations to finish up and get in game!