I've been trying to come to terms with the idea that I might not finish this, as much I want to, until maybe next summer. That kind of bums me out...well not just kind of bums me out, it really kills me. In the meantime, I've been working on a few smaller projects in what time I have had. I started asking for help in maxscript forums worldwide so I could figure out the quat math issues I've been having with the spellfire arm sheath. In the process, I figured out a way to use the wing node to possibly do other interesting wearable weapons. I don't really like using nodes with other specific purposes for such things though, as it requires that the wings of certain characters be placed on the main model, or the robe, and just creates more work.
In the process, I've come to the realization that if I had simply worked on the animation 100% manually, it would have been done by now, especially since I realized I was only going to be able to do combat cycles on the OC models. Maybe I should have a team of people as advisors who can calculate the potential hours for a project before I spend my life trying to train a robot to do that for me. 
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While I wait for the needed help on the arm sheath, I'm examining the stream idea again, especially the corner to corner one. I'm really liking how it turns out when I make them by hand. The hard part is getting enough time to myself so I can teach the robot how to do the other 1000 tiles in the set. The holiday season seems to be the worst for such tasks.
The edge seam fixer looks to be working as well. Instead of fixing the edge as the tile is made, I went with an alternative where I can retroactively fix any of the premade tiles. This lets me also fix the separate stream tiles later without having to reconstruct the whole subset script again. It simply works hard to create a continuous line of texture from one edge to another depending on the tile. As planned, it leaves some of the grass patches mid-tile away from the primary seam.
In addition, I'm working on a script which does all the multi-texture blending I need to really make these tiles flow like I wanted. I've been spending more time in games like Drakensang, really looking hard at those tiles they use while my slow internet connection struggles to visualize all the mesh parts. I guess having a slow ass computer is somewhat beneficial at times.
I've also been really studying water features in a few games. If any of you played with the CCC package for wizard's tower last month, you will have found a sea water prototype I jammed in the corner of the room. Ultimately, that single mesh was supposed to blend animesh with envmapping, which I know some people can see. Since I cannot, it makes it really hard on my mind to continue working on that. Instead I'm taking an entirely more basic approach. Some future sea water tiles will include a minimum of 3 animated meshes.
The first mesh, the one you see in the wizards' tower, will have a sea foam appearance, but be otherwise mostly transparent. The underlying mesh will have the same physical animation, but the texture will slide instead of bunch and part. Together with a sea floor mesh, these two will portray clear water, like from the carribean. A fourth mesh placed at a specific depth can represent deepening darkness as you leave the shoreline, and will make use of two textures. The first is solid color and shares an opacity across the entire plane. The other is for use against the beach where it fades from that opacity to 100% transparency as it climbs the beach up and out of the water.
The third animated mesh is for objects like rocks which are under water. Drakensang uses a different method, which is actually a visual mistake in the calculation. Basically when a solid texture is behind a transparent one, it tends to modify the opacity of the above texture somehow. They left it because it looks good. NWN tends to paint underwater rock a different texture, but with an unmoving edge. With moving water, you need a moving texture edge to portray what is under water and what is above.
I sat yesterday for about 10 minutes at the edge of a river so I could get a feel for what is actually happening, and I've joined that with the math mistake in Drakensang to create a darkening texture which animates in the same wave pattern as the water meshes. Because it relies on the specific tile it is associated with, I could never use this on placeables. Basically it moves the darkening mesh in a way which matches the water level, changing the appearance of underwater rocks to look very realistically wet, and darkened by the water volume blocking the ambient light.
I don't yet know what kind of load a large area of this will put on the system, so I don't yet know if this will only be useful for small areas, or if it can be used for fantastic playable settings. That is something I should find out soon really.
I'm also collecting a set of placeable-like animated decals for use on river surfaces. Instead of making a very complex texture, I can simply modify a few patches here and there, making the river look turbulent or foamy in various places to denote it's direction of flow. This will come in handy when I install the 8m wide river tiles. These are specifically different from the corner to corner stream I'm still working on. In all, there will be 4 water features in the mountain set. You already have the prototype for shallow and deep water packed within the set. You'll also have the two non-crosser stream and river tiles. The 8m river will only naturally fall 1 height change without additional group features. That will keep the tile requirements for that specific tile type down to about 30 or less. I'll be able to cut them in the exact same way I am cutting the corner to corner streams, with only slight modification to the script.
