I thought I would start on implementing enemies and a battle system.  To do that I needed an enemy to work with.  Staying in line with standard MMORPG tradition, I decide to make a boar.  Look at this adorable fella:

Full disclosure, he kind of looks more like a bulldog than a boar, and it has creepy human eyebrows that I’m not sure why I made, but I’m an amateur 3D modeler, so cut me some slack.  It can always be improved later.

Anyway, I stuck one in Penrith Forest just to get a look at it in the game and now I’m worried.  One of my starting goals was to creating everything in Lyridia without textures.  There are several reasons for this.  It makes asset creation simpler, it make asset exporting simpler, and it keeps the file sizes for the assets very small.  The boar model has around 600 triangles and the exported .json file is 40KB.  That’s tiny, which is great, but I’m worried that I’ll never be able to get my assets to look very good without textures.  Things like eyes, fur, dirt, scars, etc., etc., may just be impossible to create convincingly without textures.  The thing about all this is that I’m not an evangelist for a particular art style.  I wasn’t interested in using only materials because I have a vested interest in not using textures.  The bandwidth and rendering efficiency was my only concern.  If, however, I can use textures and still keep my file sizes small I’m all for it.  I guess I just really need to do some testing to see how difficult it is to use textures in my assets and keep everything straight, and how much larger the required files will be.