Saturday, August 15, 2009

Breeding Demo

Alright here it is! This is just a little demo that generates 2 random genomes (currently at over 100 base pairs), reads it, shows you what kind of horse those genes make, and then it breeds those two horses and shows you what kind of baby those horses would have! It randomly selects one allele from each parent, just like in real life, so remember the foal you see is just one of thousands that those parents could generate. To randomly generate more parents and see more horses, just refresh the page.

DEMO

Given that the genes are generated completely randomly in this demo, you see a much higher percentage of greys, unusual colors, and high sabino factors (white) here than you will in the game. Also, the only pictures that are done are for those at racing age/racing condition right now. There will be another set of foal pictures and a set of breeding-age pictures in the game.

PNG's suck

Being an artist, a good variety of art in this game is important to me - I want there to be hundreds of unique horse pictures. Rather spending 20 years to individually make all of these, I have opted to use PNG's and their support for transparency so that I can layer white markings on top of base images in combination. Pretty cool. Problem: I have noticed that in the browser, my brown and chestnut look almost identical. In Photoshop they look great, very clearly brown and red, but in the browser everything is desaturated! This turns out to be a problem inherent in the PNG format; without getting too technical, they have issues displaying the correct gamma in a browser. I found a program to adjust the gamma such that my images don't look quite so desaturated, but it's still a problem. I may have to convert my base images to JPEG and just have the markings be PNG. Not a huge loss, but it does mean forgoing the ability to customize the background on the fly...

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Sorry for the Delay

I was in a motorcycle accident so I've been dealing with that. But the demo really is on the way before too long!