I was really surprised how many people just flatout didn't like the fragile butterfly wings on my original set of mermaids, so I went back to the drawingboard to see if I could find a compromise. I'd like to have wings so that all the playable characters can participate in the full world, although a convoluted system of tail-pants that switch to legs on land, is still a maybe option. I just hate having removeable tails in the inventory, it kind of steals from the believability for me. Maybe Bloodmoon will have some new options. I also haven't yet checked out how theLys's group handled their werewolf transformation issues.

Anyway, here the mermaids are again but with a more streamlined "fishy" wingset that maybe looks a little more like a seahorse fin:

http://brash.iwebland.com/mw4k/mer2.html

Aelfwyn had some really nice pleated wings, but I couldn't chnage the sizing of them as they were opaque, and I wanted them much smaller, so I reused Dale Stocker's animated butterfly wings, but with a ton of alpha. I do have a problem in very rare instances of the full shape showing through very very faintly, so I might need to see if someone can clip the mesh back for me...

Oh, and the robots got nixed as a playable character after Texture Freak agreed to drop all criticism of every other issue, past and present and future, if I would just dump the dang robots, heh. No one else seemed to be particularly impressed by them, so I guess they are out. of course, if CON3 ends up having robots I'll be a little more suspect of his real reasons, heh.

The very last shot, looking like the mergirl is waiting for a large school of fish to pass, was kind of a fun experiment, where I took the Bethesda BlightCloud.NIF and replaced the blight texture with LadyE fishies However, the fishies aren't quite moving at the right angle/speed to look natural, so I probably won't actually use it, but large schools of low-lag fish had seemed possible there for a minute.

So far, I am staying in a very acceptable 30s-40s for framerates in most areas; we'll see what happens as more of the world fills in.