First of all, hello. It's been a while since anyone posted, and about forever since I posted. To make up for this, I present the following:

The Pokedex has been updated with over 25 new Pokemon. Gamefreak2kx (also known as Dr Freak) was bugging me to get my material settings so I did, and he thought it would be a nice Christmas surprise for you all to get a big Dex update.

There are a few more models in the waiting list so check back tomorrow(or later today, depending on when you're reading this). Until then, enjoy such marvels as Troive's Blastoise and Tyler's Aerodactyl IN MIND-BLOWING 3D! (<-- text can't echo, but imagine that bit echoing)

Now I'm gonna catch some sleep. Let me conclude by saying I'll do my best to get a bit more active on the project again(for those who don't know, I moved out of my parents' house over a year ago and have been without an Internet connection since). And let's throw in a good old 'Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!' while I'm at it.

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No, the project isn't dead. Consider this the update you've all been begging for! Just because you don't hear from us doesn't mean it's dead. Would you rather us work on the project or spend time telling you every detail?

On top of that (and I can't believe I'm repeating myself yet again), we all have LIVES. Rent to pay, jobs to go to, family members to love. Ekaiyo is NOT top priority at all times, unfortunately. So quit your whining, scallywags!

By the way, I graduated in May. Looking for a full-time position!

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Can you think of a more ridiculous couple than Paras and Mewtwo? I can't.

Gearing up for the end of school, soon to be graduating. Like I said, you'll see a lot more out of me in particular, and I know everyone else is ramping up their production as well. So keep your eyes peeled!

Enjoy!

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See, I told you I would be back in action. Now this is really just to whet the appetite of our rabid followers (you know who you are).

I personally think this is a hideous pokemon. But this gives me an opportunity to talk a bit about design, and what I've learned in art school for the past 4 years. If you're interested in good design, I suggest you listen up!

Good character design is not about creating "pretty" characters, necessarily. This is one thing that I think a lot of designers get wrong... all of their characters are attractive! In the traditional sense, that is. The same thing happens on the other side of the coin. When someone is designing an ugly character, they will end up with an ugly design! These are not the same thing. Let me explain:

Every character should have appeal, whether it's an ugly character or a pretty one. For example, if you look at some of Miyazaki's character designs in his movies, particularly for the demons in Princess Mononoke, they are absolutely hideous. They are SUPPOSED to be grotesque, ugly, and disgusting. Yet they have a beautiful and attractive sense of design. You don't want your audience to be repulsed by your character, even if they are ugly. You want ugly characters to have appeal, but not physical attractiveness. Does that make sense?

Anyway, I think Fearow is a really ugly pokemon, but it definitely has a sense of appeal. Enjoy!

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Ive just started working towards a deadline on a secret ekaiyo project and will therefore be less active on forum, z00t and irc.

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After being away for a while, I return to the forums and check
that the Graphics board is pretty much chaos, filled with pokémon
model threads everywhere. Trying to improve this, I talked with ManTis
and we decided to remodel things a bit.

We created a section for the graphics boards, and divided it into
two different boards: One containing the pokémon models discussions
and the other one containing everything else.

In addition, I created a modeling status section, so that we know immediately
in which state is the modeling process of each pokémon.

Troive is now part of the team, as he's been doing a few nice models, and he's been quite active in the forums. I hope that he can help us moderate the whole modeling process.

See you next time.

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Ahh... breathe a sigh of relief. Thesis is done and turned in. This means 2 things: I have to look for an actual job in the video game industry (do you know how hard it is to get someone to talk to you?) and more importantly for you, Ekaiyo gets more attention!

Well, most of you have seen this already, but I have not posted it officially yet, so here's my latest poke: Dewgong. Enjoy her elegant beauty.

You'll see a lot more from me soon, most likely. I am graduating in less than a month now, so if anyone has any leads on a position at a gaming company, let me know! I could use a connection or two.

I have several claims on my poke list, but I know for sure that my next two will be Fearow and Mewtwo, in that order. Look out for them.

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Daily, during the last years I've been experimenting and creating own pieces, just to reach closer to my big achievment in life - to become a great gfx artist working on a gaming-company anywhere in the world. Becoming a 3D modeler in Ekaiyo is a great step closer to my goal. Ekaiyo is a great opportunity for me to grow as an artist and in the same time fulfil a childhood dream.

As a person I am very open and full of initiative, i always have a positive attitude and engage new challanges with deepcommitment. My motto is that 'everything has a solution'. Im a popular co-worker and advocate team spirit. Its very important for me that all work should achieve the best result possible, therefore I always perform at my top and never leave a second-rated performance. My creative skills are on a high level and they have resulted in various grants and commissions of trust.

I know that i can provide Ekaiyo both qualities and knowledge that will render possible increasment of its preformances. As far s im concerned, there is no limit for knowledge and thats why I am always trying to improve my skills. I know this process will continue during my working time here at Ekaiyo, but ive also decided to continue my studies in addition to my work here, and through that become an even bigger resource for this project. Which has become a big passion of mine.

--------

If you want to stay tuned i suggest that you keep an eye on my image gallery where i post all my new renders. Right now im modeling te kanto pokemons. After that, ill move on to people and environment.

/John Troive

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Graveler has been finished. Clefairy and Clefable have been started.

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I updated the renders of Victreebel and Kadabra. For some reason the old comments on them got deleted... I'll have ask theorem about that.
Starting Graveler tonight.

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Got Kadabra almost finished today. Will post renders tomorrow.

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Decided to make a Victreebel today. Really easy pokemon, it was fun cause he's so unusual. Render posted to by image gallery.

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Hey guys, just a small update to keep you informed about the project and its progress.

We are getting great voice submissions - that's good, however it's still not enough. This is considered as the easiest way to help the project, so if you would like to contribute, just read this topic, record a pokemon voice and send it to ekaiyosounds[AT]]gmail[[DOT]com.

When it comes to music, we plan to create different type of Pokemon Center music for different places (not for every single city, just for places which stand out).
Here for instance, is the classic Pokemon Center music: Pokemon Center
And here is the Lavender Town version: Lavender Town Pokecenter (click download file on the right hand side)

MoP is creating an amazing-looking GUI for the game. I've started creating sprites for items, which can be seen here: clicky-clicky

ManTis is moving to a new house at the moment; he will be back on the 20th of November and continue finishing the alpha version of Ekaiyo.

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Hi, sorry for no activity for last month, but as always after vacations some of us returned to universities and you know how it is for those first couple weeks. Both moomoo and me are relocating to new flats, which means some time will pass till the internet will be available for us at home.

On the coding side, we're in the alpha - we've started introducing some alpha features, while some preprod features that were non-blocking are not done yet. Will have to re-work the roadmap. Lately we've been receiving coding and net design help from a friend of mine, Age of Conan developer. His expertise is invaluable and got us to redesign some portions of the engine so that Ekaiyo can be more than silly attempt at MMORPG making. Thanks Joe!

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So, with two weeks to the end of preprod phase all af us are yearning for more time, but know that it's hopeless. I haven't had good night sleep since my vacations, damn it :P

Anyways, I was kinda too lazy to update the roadmap, so here you are, list of all things that are left to code for preprod:

Animation of characters, to be implemented by ManTis
Fuzzy low-poly grass (impostor based), ManTis
Movement prediction (dead reckoning) for smoother action, ManTis
Standardizing shaders (we currently use two shaders that have inversed normals), ManTis not applicable any more
Adding better looking water, ManTis
Movement (and not only) physics, ManTis
Rotating/Moving/Deleting objects in level editor, ManTis
Public/Whisper chat, Theorem
Level exporter/importer in level editor, Theorem done
More objects support in level editor, Theorem done
Undo function in level editor, Theorem done
Roaming pokemon AI, TopYoash
GUI, TopYoash

and maybe battle engine used in-game, but that's only if we'll really have time.

As you can see yours truly will be swamped with work for next couple days. Maybe I'll offload some of it to Theorem :P. Anyways, if all will be as planned, we'll start coding on closed Alpha with the start of next month. We will also pick our testers, like promised, based on how much did they helped us develop this game. I think that's only fair, as opposed to picking up people who PM me with 'pick me for testing' or, even better, leave a comment 'mail me when this game is ready and I'll test for you: idiot@somany.isps.com'.

With this optimistic accent I'd like to end todays rant. Our next show will include moomoo juggling flaming chainsaws and babies.

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As some of your probably know, I'm taking care of sound in Ekaiyo.

I have created a few remixes of pokemon songs already, here are a few:
Pokemon Center (Elevator Music/Lounge Remix)
Gym Theme
Pokemon (Ghost) Tower (Dubstep remix)
Lavender Town (Sentimental Piano remix)
Hope you like them.

When it comes to sounds, Mantis posted a few attack sounds some time ago.
However, I am not working on attack sounds only - I also create pokemon voices. Although I can imitate a few pokemon, I can't imitate them all. That's why we need your help.
First of all, read the topic at the boards. You'll find there suggestions, advice and references.
Then, chose a pokemon and record it's voice. You will contribute to the project! All voices are morphed, corrected and cleaned, so don't worry that someone will recognise your voice (if you would worry about that anyway).

Here are some examples:
Golem
Psyduck
Magnemite (faint)

We need your help, so if you want to submit your voices, end them to: ekaiyosounds[AT]gmail[DOT]com (replace the stuff in brackets with @ and . of course, spam prevention).

Happy recording!

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First of all, I'd like to say that I'm grateful for all the praise - I don't really think it's deserved, as the things I'm really proud of in preprod state - networking, physics, scripting and battle mechanics aren't visible in the picture I uploaded. Still, it feels nice.

I will add some eyecandies for Preprod, couple roaming pokemon and we'll move on to working on Alpha (unless Theorem will add something in the meantime, while I'm working on that ;)).

Oh yeah, did I mention that couple new models made their way into the Ekaiyo Pokedex?

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The vacations were amazing. Since I was out of range of any mobile phone, I was offline. And it was good.

But I'm back and time to work. Preprod is more or less functional, and we're adding final stuff to it. Guess I should update the roadmap once I'm back home. Theo is working on ABE so we prolly will have ABE functionality in some form within the game engine (as opposed to console only text-based battles). Swarming AI are developed for the pokemon and I'm taking all things that others don't have time to wrap their heads around and implementing it (gaming-specific code that I have background with, and other programmers may not).

I'm in two minds about showing our current progress. The map is just a heightmap crudely textured and there are no models other than players and some pokemon. There is no real GUI, as etix mysteriously disappeared again and the console looks ugly. Ugly things tend to scare people off. The reason we're not going public with preprod is because if people see 'omg, Pokemon MMORPG!', download it and see glitchy 3D-chatroom-game they tend to go away and never look back. OTOH, it does show some progress. Also it shows that we care about you guys and that there IS some code working. I'll ask the team how they feel about it. Tell me what you think as well - do you want ugly pictures couple times a week showing off what we're currently working on or rather bunch of pictures displaying polished features once a month or so. TIA.

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As you could see in ManTis's previous post, he'll be out until the 9th, or something like that. So I've been developing the pre-production demo while he's gone.
I've finished all my assigned tasks, so I'm just waiting for his return to tweak the shader a bit and help me out with movement prediction.
I tested it out with moomoo and TopYoash, and everything seems to be working fine. I guess we're on the right track now.

All is going well in that department, so I decided to update Ekaiyo's ABE -- Advanced Battle Engine.

As one could see in the forum thread about ABE, I was porting the old C++ code to C#. That was about a year ago. This summer, I'm working on it again.

I'm now working on the multiplayer battle architecture, which requires handling actions from several clients in the same battle and stuff.
It will be pretty straightforward, I just have to get some inspiration.
Having it finished, I'll move on to the damage calculator, which was done in the C++ version, but needs to be ported.

If I have this done on time, we could actually integrate it with the preproduction demo; that would be just awesome.

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We finished Alpha at work, so I can get a little breather - took 1.5 weeks off and going to spend them with a middle of woods with my gf, far from everybody else, swimming in river and watching grass grow. It will be awesome.

Other than that with theo we played a bit on preprod demo. Nearly all elements work flawlessly - shader, movement, conversations, etc. He will work on some parts of it while I'll be gone, and I'm taking my laptop with me, maybe I'll work on it if it'll be raining and I'll be really really really bored :P. On 10th we'll prolly wrap all of this and finish the preprod stage.

Have a nice week.

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Welcome back, people. Summer's upon us and the work (as always during summer) is redoubled. Theo updated the website (be sure to read about all the new features if you haven't already), and artists are producing models faster than ever. Since everybody was confused about which pokemon are done and which aren't, with the rejuvenation of the website we created a small suprise for you: Ekaiyo Pokedex. In it you'll find all models that have been approved and finalized. There's tons of models that you haven't seen yet, so take a look at it! If something's in there, you can expect it in the game. So far it has 90 pokemon, but only because we reverted some of them after deciding that they are not of the quality we want to have in our game. You have probably seen some of the not-quite-finished on the forums, or if you came to IRC. About 40 more pokemon are being polished, expect them to be added very rapidly.

On the programming side I'm finishing final stages of preprod demo. It will take place on n00b island and will be laying grounds for public alpha. No, do not ask when it's done. It will be done when it will be ready, ok? Good. The deal is that I simply don't want to give you a 3D chatroom with no gameplay. If you want a _real_ Pokemon MMORPG, give us some more time. I can promise you that it will be worth it.

PS: As you already (seriously, do it) read in Theorem's news post, we have RSS. Don't bother to read mine there, instead read what I've written here. I usually re-edit my post couple times - I prefer to have one long post than 13059735107 small ones in one day.

PPS: 91st model added. Woo!

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Here they are guys!

As you may or may not know, the modelers of Ekaiyo have been viciously modeling their socks off and we have a preview of more to come shortly. Here we have Magnezone, Bronzor, and Magikarp.

ENJOY!

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Here they are guys! I've been working on little scenery bits. They're "done", meaning that ManTis has said they're good enough to move on. But the textures are subject to change, based on opinions- mainly Mantis's. But I'm curious on your opinions. Overall shape is 99% done, but may change depending on feedback. Post replies; I'll read them all.

Sleeping bag
Stone
Fence
Bench
Firepit
Beach bar

EDIT: I took liberty of fixing your post. Also, I don't recall actually approving those things. Didn't we work on e.g. beach bar yesterday?

regards,
M.

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Here he is! Brockulous! Our favorite breeder, lover of igneous formations, and questionable pedophile.

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For those of you who actually check this blog regularly (all 3 of you, thanks!), I wanted to let you know that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. I've just moved back to Florida for a summer 3D teaching job here, so that took a lot of my time. Also, I'm changing pace for a bit and doing a gym leader, so it takes a bit longer. I'm about halfway through my Brock model and it's looking pretty good to me. So keep an eye out for that soon.

I'm always taking suggestions for which pokémon to model next, so feel free to let me know what you'd like to see. Make sure it hasn't been done. There are threads in the forums for confirmation.

In other news: Sexual Harassment meeting tomorrow! Awesome!

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I did a short tutorial for a Bronzong model that I did. Now this is my first tutorial, so I may not explain things the best that they can be explained. These are things I need to know for future reference, so I can better teach these concepts. JB already gave me his two cents, and I encourage anyone else to ask questions if they're confused about a topic. Please use the forums.

Videos:
1 - Bronzong 1
2 - Bronzong 2
3 - Bronzong 3
4 - Bronzong 4
5 - Bronzong 5

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Well, one pretty horse without hair. And a... worm kind of thing, with antlers. And a scary looking bird.

Scroll back through my pictures to get some other updates. I uploaded 4 today, so they're not all displayed on the main page.

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So sorry it had to be feebas. There are at least 3 more coming very soon though, so be prepared.

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Well, I'm back. Don't have decent net at home, but I do have normal home. I've worked on integrating basic physics (movement, not like all those fancy demos you're thinking about), collision and controls. Worked a bit on animation and that's about it - spent rest of my week disassembling and assembling furniture, moving them down and upstairs, cleaning, packing, unpacking, being tired, being frustrated, being angry. Thanks god it's over (at least for now).

Also started working on my small DS project that may bring me some cash. Won't talk too much about it now.

What else, what else? Ah, I've extended z00ttheater.com for another year. Hopefully it'll be eventful one, right? ;).

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Just a quickie - finishing my moving to hamburg, took me whole week, tomorrow will be done, will update more.

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Okay so I lied. This was a rather speed update. Seel wasn't very challenging though. Next, Ponyta!

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As promised, Growlithe and Lapras. Next on deck, Seel and Ponyta. Don't expect such a speedy update this time... I had growlithe an Lapras nearly complete before.

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Hey everyone, you may know me from the forums. Well my name is Justin (aka SeraphsWitness) and I'm currently going to school at Ringling College of Art and Design for Computer Animation. I'm in my senior year and I'm about to start work on my thesis project as soon as school starts up again. That means for the summer, I'll be doing a lot of stuff for Ekaiyo hopefully.

Thus far, you can see my finished Chansey model. I have two other models almost finished, soon to be uploaded after some minor tweaks. In the near future, look out for Growlithe and Lapras!

Glad to be a part of the team. Be sure to check back for regular updates, as I expect to be crankin' out pokemon. Hopefully I'll get into some animation stuff too.

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Me and Theo are currently working on the fucked up animation system. It's really annoying and I've restarted it couple times already.

Haven't been working much during the weekend because I spent it on painkillers and in hospital (don't ask, guess one should get proper healing instead of saying 'I'm cured' after 1 day of lying in bed :D). I'm feeling better now, but I'm still in bed with sickness. Actually, this means I'll regain the time I lost on weekend. Hopefully.

jahajazz created couple pokemon, out of which 2 have caught my heart especially:

Poliwag
and
Psyduck

Enjoy!

PS: Oh yeah, a very important thing - if anybody out there has Pokemon Revolution and could take pictures/videos of every single pokemon for reference for our modellers (as it's sometimes hard to tell how something is supposed to look from just pokedex pictures), we would be very grateful, and it would speed up graphics creation process considerably.

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We've been contacted by Pivot, from the core crew of PokeGlobal, and he had a very interesting invitation for us.
There seems to be an initiative called the "Pokemon Net Consortium". It is composed by several Pokemon MMORPG developers, coming from different games, such as PokeGlobal, PokeQuest and Pokemon Online Revolution.
Its aim is to specificate a common network protocol shared by all the games, opening up a couple of new possibilities. One of them being allowing battles between games, and possibly some other kind of interaction.

Me, as the core crew developer responsible for networking and the battle system, am currently assigned to the task of maintaining contact with Pivot and the other PNConsortium developers.
As every other game is 2D, and we are the only 3D one, there might be some
impossibilities in the creation of a single protocol, but we'll see how this might work out.

I hope that this noble movement brings profit to every MMORPG involved.

Meanwhile, I've been working with LUA and with Networking in C#, and I was
able to create a simple chat, with a server, many clients, and a bot whose
behaviour is programmed in LUA scripting.

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So, animation still isn't done. Yish. It's starting to make me angry, but I'll work a bit in the week. Hopefully it'll work out.

bezet, our newest addition to team, audio specialist, have started creating sounds for Ekaiyo. Here are some examples: Tail Whip, Hydro Pump, Bite, and Tackle. Enjoy.

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I worked a bit on Ekaiyo (as you can see on project roadmap). Collision stuff mostly. I've mostly created system for collision to work with, now I'll return to updating other basics of the engine. Damn, why Theorem has so little work and I have so much? ;_;.

Anyways, I'm bit sick, so I'll prolly spent whole my weekend in bed, coding. Will keep you updated and be sure check the roadmap from time to time!

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I got a flat! Or, actually, a room. But it's sealed off from the rest of a house and self-containing; kitchen part, toilet, BAR :D. It's also in middle of Hamburg's alternative centre, so lots of pubs around. Landlord seems a nice fellow (he whipped out a vodka after we've done the bussiness). I have a nets over there, so expect me to work again.

Well, that's about it. TTYS

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Yesterday was another coding night, so we moved ahead a bit. Even mooms found some time to join us, even though he has finals starting next week and is busy as hell.

I'm working currently on supporting some decent 3D model format that can be created using Blender (COLLADA text mode for now), and it's progressing bit by bit. I should have full usability for that done very soon.

For the weekend I'll head to my old flat, and maybe fix my gf's comp - that is, if her hard drive is not physically dead - that would allow me to take my laptop back. And that means way more work may be done, as now I can only develop on evenings at work.

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Hullo thar, haven't seen you in ages!

I'm moving to another city, as some of you may know, to new company. Now instead of working on DS and PSP games, I'm working on games for Wii. I had to leave my laptop with my gf in the old city, cause her comp broke down, as usual. I'll prolly have final appartament before 1st May (now I'm living @ my mate's) and somewhere after that, my network at home.

Theorem and me have again more time, and as usual in summer season, Ekaiyo is going back to life. Since people've been asking for it, we have added roadmap for the project (clicky). It's not fully done yet - we started working on it yesterday, it's not updated with what we've done, and it doesn't have all the issues we'll be adressing, but it is out there, and you might want to check out from time to time, as it will be best way to measure progress.

We still have to wait for moomoo for more content, but we will keep progressing on our own. Well then, enjoy the ride.

Update: if you click on 'Feature #something' you'll see description of that feature, might help you understand some weird names.

Also, keep in mind that the list is not and probably never will be completed. There will always be something added, if not feature, then bug. It's good approximation to where are we with the project currently however, and good way for us to keep track of how the team is progressing, and this was the main reason it was uploaded there.

So please no 'THAR WAS SUPPOZED 2 B VERSIOON RELESD 2 WEEKZ AGO BUT U ADDD 10 TASKZ, WAAAAAH! U SUCKZ!' complaints. I will ban by IP and username people who will provide such unconstructive criticizm :). Have a nice day.

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Well, we have update on the text chat issue.

To clarify the intention of Section 2.d. of the 2.0 EULA: this restriction only applies if your program is interacting with Microsoft's networking services, e.g. Xbox or Games for Windows LIVE service ('LIVE'). If you are implementing a solution that does not in any way interact with LIVE then this section would not apply. We are evaluating an unencrypted means to implement text chat in the next GSE release so that you would be able to implement text chat functionality over LIVE.

Please note that if you do decide to implement any non-LIVE networking functionality with communication capabilities, you are responsible for comply with any applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

YAAAY, we don't need to revert to XNA 1.0 refresh!

See you all in couple days.

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First of all - sorry for not only the wait, but also for lack of informations. Last couple weeks have been really frantic - I was supposed to have 3 weeks off from work, but since the game we're working (at work) is coming late, they revoked my vacations and I'm staying here every day for ~12-16 hours. It'll be this way till 9th of January, which is the final submission date (hopefully). After that we're regaining works.

In other news: Microsoft released XNA 2.0 which is pretty sweet, but the EULA has a gotcha - you can't use text chat within it, as the LIVE network is encrypted and it violates Patriot Act and other stuff like that that forbids encrypted conversation. Using Windows Sockets system may or may not prevent this - dunno, XNA team still haven't answered this (prolly at least THEY have vacation ;) ). The other solution, proposed by Shawn Hargreaves (XNA dev) was that they will add something that will allow for unencrypted data sending. Have to see how this will turn out. For the time being, Ekaiyo is still developed in XNA 1.0 Refresh. Since I won't have even one evening free before 9th of Jan, probably this issue will be resolved before I'll sit back to working on the game ;).

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Finally, mooms has finished his internship at a company he's been working at and we can resume working on Ekaiyo. We want to work on animations this weekend, concluded by networking test.

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At long last, we have the "final" animation sequence for mudkip in video form. Sorry it took a while, but school's a pain in the ass. I also started a new job, so hopefully I'll have more than a 0$ an hour income, because, you know, that doesn't pay well. Anyway, without further rambling, here we go!

www.z00ttheater.com/downloads/mudkips.avi

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The day has arrived, all you people who have sat waiting.

Mudkip is fully animated. I have 13, count them, 13 animations done!

We have the following:

Taunt
Winning
Fainting
Receiving slight hit
Receiving hard hit
Special attack (water gun)
Physical attack (tackle)
Swim sequence
Run sequence
Walk sequence
Idle (durring battle)
Idle (durring battle, when health is low)
Jump sequence

They're all done, but ManTis might tell me to clean them up a bit. Anyway, I'll make vids and see if we can get them all posted on here!

Stay tuned!

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Okay everyone! I have been working on mudkip recently and I have made many movement animations! The completed ones are:

Walk sequence
Run sequence
Idle in battle (normal)
Idle in battle (while heavily damaged)

And my fav: Water gun

The first 4 are pretty self explanitory, but I'll give you a verbal description of water gun (because I don't know how to load avi files). Hopefully I can get ManTis to help me load it up. Until then, it'll be just words.

Now, the watergun goes like this:

Mudkip stands still
Mudkip rears back on its hind legs (like a cat about to jump)
Mudkip jumps foward and lands
Mudkip stretches onto its tip toes while opening his mouth
Mudkip holds its mouth open and remains on tip toes while its tail wags vigourously
Mudkip relaxes and closes its mouth, returning to the soles of its feet
Mudkip leans foward an inch on its front legs
Mudkip jumps backwards (while facing foward)
Mudkip lands in initial position

(Trust me, it's very cute.)

Update by ManTis:

CLICK ME FOR THE VIDEO

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Hey guys. This will be where the stuff is happening. I'm lookin foward to seein this game up and running, so expect beautiful things to be happenin here :) One thing that you might all be excited to know about: Mudkip has a walk sequence. Is it good? Probably not. But it's enough for Pre-Alpha and that's a huge step in the right direction.

Stay tuned!

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Haven't updated this project in long time, now have I?

Since moomoo/Laroon are still working on getting animations to work correctly with new file format, I had some time to play with my side project. They're getting closer to working it out, so I returned to coding for Ekaiyo. We're aiming on starting new network test (just one type of player/one pokemon to play with, but still it's a huge step.

The network test WON'T be using any final map, most probably it'll be just flat surface, but I'm writing it in a way that'll let me expand it through patches (kinda like Blizzard does), so probably the network test will eventually grow into game once all other stuff is finalized and added.

I'm playing with Level Editor atm, making it easier for designers to use it, but I broke something (picture). Maybe I shouldn't pre-optimise the code? ;)

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Well, haven't gotten much work done this week, as I spent it whole on perscription painkillers ( :D ), but will get back to working on weekend. The pain is slowly dissapearing and I can finally use mouse without wincing every second.

I managed to create small test on level editor, but it was a dead-end path, so I've reverted it and went back to normal coding. Will write about that bit more tomorrow.

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Well I just uploaded all the models I've done so far.
The first one being Arbok!
Others can be found clicking the "Keio's gallery" link :P

I'm not modeling too much this days since I was travelling, organizing, etc. But once I'm in my home/studio work will continue.

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Hi all, I guess I'm the new guy in this team. I've been here for 3 or 4 weeks, but I'll stay a little longer :)

I started doing some 3D models like Turtwig.
And others that I'll post later.
After I'll animate them and hopefully all the 3D pokemons, objects, etc will be done soon. (All members working hard :P)

So, I'll keep this blog updated with my work, enjoy!

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So, I'm back from GC Leipzig. It was crazy, I met lot of people from last years Game Developers Conference in London, I had great time. Managed to play Starcraft 2 ( was good), Pokemon Battle Revolution (not revolutionary but still sweet), and Wii Fit (less intuitive to control than I hoped, out of all things that were shipped with it a massive ONE (Ski Jump) might become good party game :/.

I've seen/played lots of other games, but too many to recall, so I won't bother. Girls were, as usual, incredible. And parading topless, with only paint on them. Hur hur hur.

After getting back to my city, we played Tennis and I tore my sinew - it is a pain like hell to type, so I'm coding with one hand. Takes ages. But after whole night on painkillers I don't feel like forcing my borked arm to work.

Well, back to coding I guess.

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Laroon has joined the Pokémodeling team and sent in his Hitmonlee model. Nice work man.

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In my first post you read my biggest role in Ekaiyo is working on the GUI. I already showed you how the Login screen will probably look like, but now I come with something different, you can find it here.

The picture shows the character customization frame. Here you will be able to fully customize your player model. It's still in beta, so a few things will be changed. At first, the menu on top of the screen are just words now, they will be replaced by icons. On the right side of the screen the model you are customizing will be shown.

Probably also the sketches of the hairstyles will be changed to pictures of 3d hairstyles.

Check my Blog page for more updates about the GUI. The upcoming weeks I will mainly work on the character customization interface.

Greets

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After playing with it for best part of the day, I got projective textures more or less working. More or less, means that it displays. Sometimes. Because of z-fighting the radius of terrain tool might not always be displayed, however most of the time it's there.

Tomorrow I'll try to fix this and a weird bug I'm having with camera, and eventually move to modifying the terrain in correct way. After that it'll be adding more usability to the terrain sculptor.

Things to be implemented:
-Raise
-Lower
-Level
-Grab (optional)
-Smooth
-Erode
-Push (optional)
-Ramp

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For the past few days I've been working with the rest of the 3D graphics guys (the ones that were present anyway) to make a detailed list of Pokémon models that are completed or in the works. We have posts for this on the forums but I didn't update them for the longest time, and the format sn't very handy either. We now have an online document where the modelers can easily see exactly what models are needed, and what stage each model is in. It's just a spreadsheet but at least we can sort by things like priority, original modeler, level of completion, etc.

This doc itself isn't public, however I will regularly export it and put it on the website - I will replace the two topics in the forum with just a link to the page.

I haven't started on any new models myself since finishing the Gyarados. I'll be focusing on working through the list of models that have been sent to me that I haven't checked yet.

Here is the list. As I said it's exported from the actual spreadsheet so it will not be updated automatically but rather only when I do it manually. I will probably only update it when models are completed or new ones claimed.

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What's happening on level editor:

Lots of small bugs fixed, added possibility to move the camera, now I'm adding (and this'll prolly take whole day) projected 'select terrain' tool, which basically tells you how much terrain cells you affect with your tool. After that I'll change per-triangle terrain modification to per-vertex.

So far two terrain modifiers are implemented basically - raise and lower. As you can see [http://www.z00ttheater.com/website/users/3/gallery/15]on the screenshot[/url] it doesn't look awesome yet, but hey - progress is a progress.

Update: I changed color scheme to be bit more intuitive, of course still it doesn't look perfect, but i think it's a progress. Check it here.

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Well, it turns out that there WAS somebody in the office. So I downloaded the stuff I worked on at work and am developing it further now. Here's the result so far. Still some issues need to be resolved - quite a lot, actually, but first step has been made.

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Having spent the day looking over all my old models and redoing some parts of them I decided to relax and do diglett / dugtrio.
here are some pics:

Diglett

Dugtrio

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Well, I managed to have editor on the level I left the MDX one, as you can see here. The only things that are different are: not implemented picking (that wasn't working very well in MDX version very well either way) and the fact that render loop actually updates correctly in real time. Hardest part, which is dealing with non-pipeline content is through, now it's only coding the 'meat' with very little dealing with graphical devices for long time. Yay.

Update: Oh great, I haven't checked in the newest version I worked on at work. If somebody will be in office tomorrow I'll get it, if not - no coding till monday, as I'm not feeling like re-writing this shitty map code again.

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Hi all I am Jahajazz I have been working on ekaiyo for about 1 and a half years. I have made a little over 40 pokemon for ekaiyo now and I'd like to think I'm getting fairly adept at it. If anyone is interested in early renders to see what I'm making my blog is the place for you. Also if anyone is interested in learning to model and has a few questions about blender I am always willing to help you out.

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I've worked some on transfering level editor from XNA to MDX (as the latter totally lost its attractiveness, XNA 2.0 has been announced to be in works, MDX is discontinued). So far I'm displaying only basic stuff, but other stuff will be added shortly. Back to work it seems.

Speaking of work, my company is sending me to Games Convention Leipzig next week. Gonna drink till I drop ;).

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I'm glad this thing is finished. I was the guy who coded the page, so I better not hear any complaints.
I used z00tTheater to test the PHP framework I'm working on, so I could test deploying a website on a
strange server. Lots of bugs came out, so it was a kind of positive experience, but it still has a lot
of work needed to be done, though.

(Also, the text area where I'm writing is this small: |------------------|, so it kind of sucks).

Anyway, I had to stop working on ABE in order to work on this, so the time schedule got changed. I am no
longer working on it, and I am on a very tight schedule right now, working for our national health
regulating entity as a programmer/syadmin for the month of August. I don't know when I'll have time for
ABE anymore, but I'll try to finish it ASAP. I've been fiddling with networking in C#, trying to get
players to connect. I'll need to plan the database for players information, aswell. I don't really
know what to do first, the networking or the battle engine. The battle engine is more exciting, so
I guess I'll go that way.

And this is it. Bye o:

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Hi all.

ManTis asked me to introduce myself since probably only a few know me from the forums, so here i go.

I'm etix, 19 years old and I'm from the Netherlands. Studying Marketing & Communication in Amsterdam. I think there isn't much more you need to know from my personal life, so i'll say something about my work on the Ekaiyo project.

My job on Ekaiyo is taking care of all the 2D graphics. So basically this has everything to do with the GUI (frames, maps, icons, pokemon pictures, etc.) and promotion like banners and website (designed the z00ttheater website too).

There were already some screenshots on the forums of Ekaiyo, but to fresh up your mind (and for the people that didn't saw this screenshots) i'll start posting the Login screen. It will probably not be the final, from time to time i'll change things on it.

Here it is.

Hope you like it :),

Adios!

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So, the new website is up, and we finally got to reveal that animation we held from you for two weeks.

I already said it in the comments there but I'll repeat it here: the video does not use ingame graphics, it's pre-rendered. It does show what we hope Ekaiyo will look like (at least!), and the Pokémon models are just the game models. They haven't been smoothened or given extra detail, so graphics like these are not outside the realm of possibility.

Wow, sure is long since my last blog entry.

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Well, after page being finished, we can return to standard working. You may wonder - the vidya was cool, but are we able to reproduce their looks in game? Well, wonder no more; I give you - cel shaded Mudkip!

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I'm the fist of the north star!

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