I was going answer this question directly under the comments of my last entry, but I thought I would add it as an entry. It's not an entirely interesting story..well maybe it is. Well...it would be if I tossed in some crazy story about dragons...especially those wingaling dragons. Anyway...the question:

How and why did you come up with the name "Nitrous Butterfly"?

Well, honestly, it has absolutely nothing to do with drangons. None!

It all started shortly after I got fired from a job I was at for far too long and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the crazy summer of 2003 and suddenly not having a job gave me the opportunity to attend the MAX U4 class down at the Renaissance Center in loverly Dickson, TN. It was a solid month of 3D mayhem where I got to eat over sized country hamburgers and, of course, meet up with my future business partner. I went down there with the thought of starting a small gaming company and was still trying to figure out how I was going to do it when I met Mark Miley. Mark and I, other than attending class, spent the entire time coming up with an awesome game concept and story (which to this day is still on the back burner) and realizing our mutual passion for the gaming medium.

We were all cooped up in the lab working on a project and drinking far too much caffeine when the company name chose to announce itself. I'm still not entirely certain how it all started, but we were joking about butterflies and laughing gas. I have to re-iterate here that we all had way too much caffeine in our systems. One thing lead to another and someone said Nitrous Butterfly which someone retorted would be a good name for a band. Mark and I looked at each and said...that would be a good name for a game company. And that was when the dragons reigned fire down on the building and-. Wait...I said there were no dragons.

So there you have it. Not an entirely interesting story, but there lies the origins none-the-less. For more information on the effects of laughing gas on a butterfly please check your local library.

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Ok...now on to same development related news. I have been expanding the engine and have a working 3ds loader and have been working on implimenting the cal3d library for our character animations. All of the definitions for the objects are stored in lua script files for easy modification. I'm still having some issues with cal3d, however. The mesh and animations are working fine, but I'm having issues binding the texture properly. I'm storing it in the cal3d user data of the corematerial of the coremodel, but for some reason it's not getting the texture id properly when I have an instance of the model. I have a post up on the forum about it, but if anyone has any ideas feel free to let me know.

I'm trying to nail down exactly how are levels are going to setup , but I'm at a point now after rehashing the engine that I atleast have some visuals up on the screen. More testing will be required to get a proper map format.

Alright...well that's about it. Until next time!