I've spent a rather frustrating few days trying to force an old lady to sit in a chair. Not a real old lady, that would be cruel and probably illegal. No this is a model in a serious game we are developing. I had this crazy idea that it would be real easy to get her to sit in a chair. All I needed to do was move her to a standing position in the correct place relative to the chair, then blend to the sitting animation. Turned out it was easy to get it working, very hard to get it looking good though. Finally I realized that the problem is caused by two things

1) the sitting animation is 90degrees rotated from the standing. I guess if I had Max I'd have spotted that earlier. But I don't, so I didn't :(

2) Unity doesn't like blending through such a big rotation. Actually I'm not technically using a blend anyway. I'm using the fade. Maybe the blend would work? Who knows? Unity aren't answering my questions which is a bit frustrating. Anyway it sometimes works depending on the starting rotation in world space of the old lady. Strange that it depends on world space. I would have expected them to do the blend in object space then transform to world space. Anyway it doesn't matter cos it's busted and I can't fix it. Matt is going to try and rotate the animations and then hopefully that will fix the problem. It's taken a long time to work out what's wrong and that I can't fix it. Which is doubly frustrating

On a more positive note I've got a great book from Amazon for the bargain second hand price of $30.00 (should have been about $70 new). The snappily and excitingly named "Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform". It's become my favourite bedtime read. Simon knows it all but I need to swot up on some of the more obscure aspects of C# and .net. Also on a positive note Telstra are connecting up our phone and broadband. Looks like we'll get ADSL2. It will be nice to have a reasonably fast connection at home again. For the past six months we've made do with wireless which is a bit hit and miss.

Oh and I remember now why I was so keen to move to WA a few years back.

Canberra winter is cold enough to freeze the nuts of a bicycle...

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