Heya Technomage, thanks for setting everything up!
For some reason the character_customization branch was not merged back to trunk in svn - rather, trunk was patched.
Would that make any further changes to SVN trunk necessary? Or can we simply continue with the current SVN trunk as it contains all the changes from the last sprint branch?
Concerning branches/media: I think there are two options in this case:
1. Set up a seperate media hg/git repository where the media files (raw assets) reside.
2. Continue to use SVN for the media files. We don't really benefit from DVCS features for these specific files. The obvious drawback would be that we would be using two different kind of version control systems in PARPG in this case though.
Concerning the trunk/game/objects folder: rendering the assets in there on the fly on the target system is not an option to be honest. There are a couple of reasons:
1. I don't want to introduce Blender as an dependency to just test the game.
2. It wouldn't be only Blender, but we would even have to make 3dsMax & XSI|Softimage a dependency as not all models in there are available as Blender files. E.g. all the (N)PC animations have been done in XSI and aren't availabe as Blender files so we can't render them on the target system.
3. Even worse: some renders don't come with any raw asset versions at all. This means we can't reproduce these objects from source. While this shouldn't happen in open source project (missing raw assets), it's unfortunately the case. Some artists showed up, sent in renders we liked and suddenly vanished before sending in the 3d models and textures for these renders. In these cases we'll have to leave the rendered versions in the repository or replace these assets with new versions.
4. There are some objects in there that are based on 2d art instead of 3d models, e.g. the bottle that lies on the ground. We would have to handle 2d & 3d objects seperately; I don't think we should do that as it makes things even more complicated.
IMHO all the objects should stay inside our VCS repository for the sake of easy access and uncomplicated way of setting a test environment for new devs up.