So, I finally experimented with the new camera stuff, and here's what's up. There's some good news and some bad news.

The bad news:

- We'll need to throw out ALL the camera data we compiled before. None of it can be used. I know it sucks. That's a lost of wasted effort. :/

- All of the code I made to cleverly guess camera angles by hashing mobs on multiple attributes is completely unnecessary. All of the complex database manipulation utilities I made have no point now. (I'm still dumbfounded by this. That was like a month of work that was all just summarily deleted.)

The good news:

- Mobs can be uniquely identified by the model name. There are no more problem mobs.

- The camera survey is fairly trivial. In fact, I already completed it.

I basically had to do the equivalent of 408 mobs the old way. The difference is that I did not need to find the mobs. Instead, I just wrote some utilities to load them up abstractly. It was probably closer to doing 1200 models, since I had to go through them about 3 times fixing things that I had got wrong before like better angles for mobs that can be pets and be displayed in a pet frame or the size problem I talk about below.

The only problem I had is that many of these models were adjusted without textures on them. Basically, all I saw was a pure white model. This made it hard to correctly adjust the camera in some cases. Mobs that have complicated textures or wear armor can be larger than their blank model counterpart, so my positioning or sizing can be slightly off (too large or too far down). I also had a hard time determining what direction certain mobs were facing. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were 180 degrees off. So, even though we are NOT doing a formal survery, I would still like you guys to be mindful of the camera angles. If you see a mob that needs slight adjustment, write down the model name and post it in this thread along with what was wrong with it. The '?' key in 0.5 will let you see what the model being used by the current mob is. Also, please try to visit as many instances and zones as possible so you can check out more mobs. There's no need to be exhaustive or go out of your way, but I'd feel better if I knew most of the models were viewed by someone.

Good job on the camera survey. We got this one done much faster than the last!

p.s. a big thanks to tigerheart for helping me experiment and figure out the new model stuff after I released 0.4