Ideas for Movement

Ok, so, I have a few ideas here on how to make your animal move right, and make it move how you want it to. This will affect your creatures Speed, jumping abilities, and off-road travelling abilities ect.

After you've made your animal, you get to choose a movement set. There should be preset ones for easy selection, like:

Crocodile
Bird
Cattle
Theropod
Sauropod
Human
Gorilla

ect. But there should also be a movement creator, allowing you to edit the movement. If you're having sea animals in this game, other movement sets should be including, too:

Shark
Whale
Frog
Crocodile
Squid
ect.

Just thought I'd throw some ideas up there, I wont be following this forum. Thanks for reasing, anyhoo.

-Galox

I'd just like to say there should be the option to have no movement, too.

And can I add to the idea:


If the muscles are too weak, some choices may not be available.


Muscles for sudden bursts can't be used in normal movement.


You should be able to have multiple movement choices, (either named or numbered) such as:

Normal for organism (maybe normal for organism 2)

Running/faster flight/faster swim (maybe a 2 option again)

Possibly baby movement (wriggle and or crawl) (I say possibly because hopefully the game can decide baby movements, and you shouldn't have the ability to make a human baby walk)

Stealth (try not to use hard impacts to lower sound production) (fish could be to move water as little as possible) (for birds maybe this could be repaced by glide) (plants could use muscles to stop movement)

Playing dead (no movement) (possibly activation of glands to produce dead smells)

Any more you can come up with feel free to suggest.

Most Terrestrial Endoskeletal Organism on Earth's walking gaits are determined by the way the spine can bend more freely, the position of the feet and shape of the legs relative to the body, and the number of legs.

One of my ideas before the recent-old forum died, was to have each of the muscles increases and decrease in length, and each muscle has an individual value in each individual pose and animation. Each muscle's value is also selected by natural selection. The poses are broken down into animations that don't take much Resources on the Computer when used in-game.

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

~sciocont wrote:

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

That also appears at this stage to be a good idea, so long as it doesn't turn out like Spore's 'Procedural' gaits.

GamerXA wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

That also appears at this stage to be a good idea, so long as it doesn't turn out like Spore's 'Procedural' gaits.

Spore's end result wasn't procedural at all. If we don't do better than that, we didn't try.

From what I gathered, Bash was going to make the procedural gaits to logically match the structure of said organism. I suppose we could force the gait assigned to the organism to be replaced, though.

InvaderZim wrote:

From what I gathered, Bash was going to make the procedural gaits to logically match the structure of said organism. I suppose we could force the gait assigned to the organism to be replaced, though.

It might create some strange appearances, though.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

GamerXA wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

That also appears at this stage to be a good idea, so long as it doesn't turn out like Spore's 'Procedural' gaits.

Spore's end result wasn't procedural at all. If we don't do better than that, we didn't try.

Exactly.

Procedural Gaits are going to annoying to accomplish and to fine tune.

GamerXA wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

GamerXA wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

That also appears at this stage to be a good idea, so long as it doesn't turn out like Spore's 'Procedural' gaits.

Spore's end result wasn't procedural at all. If we don't do better than that, we didn't try.

Exactly.

Procedural Gaits are going to annoying to accomplish and to fine tune.

But it's probably the best way. Procedurals will, i think, be controlled by the entire body, not just the legs and such.

GamerXA wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

GamerXA wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Last i remember, Bash was thinking of a procedural gait animator.

That also appears at this stage to be a good idea, so long as it doesn't turn out like Spore's 'Procedural' gaits.

Spore's end result wasn't procedural at all. If we don't do better than that, we didn't try.

Exactly.

Procedural Gaits are going to annoying to accomplish and to fine tune.

Accomplishing procedural gaits and fine-tuning them is my job though
I don't mind the annoyance.

Also, on top of actually making the model walk, many fine adjustments are made to e.g. the skin and fat clinging to the body, to give a much higher impression of realism (basically, as the creature moves about its fat "jiggles" for instance) This is all prechached in order to reduce load on the cpu.

If anyone is interested on just how i am going to accomplish procedural gaits, I arrange the bones in order of where they are on the spine, and walk down each bone moving them with a delay depending on how far they are down the spine, and treating left and right sides as 90 degrees out of phase. Also, walking along the tree, to muscles, and skin, have delays set as well. Each item in the creature also adds to a mass scalar field, which is used by the system to determine weight distribution and affects the movement of the creature, and its parts, as well, amongst other tweaks and so on.

In the beginning, there will be certain types of creatures that will have extremely odd gaits.
You submit a bug report, along with the creature file, and i'll add a patch to account for whatever i didn't before that caused the odd gait.

Essentially, creatures should walk as close as possible to walk how they would in real life. Crabs walk they way they do not because they are crabs, but because they are _shaped_ like crabs, if that makes sense. Having two identical creatures structuraly with different gaits doesn't make any sense.

Isn't the similar gaits for similar bodies achieved because of convergent evolution.

Also, how do you intend to achieve procedural gaits with radically different organisms such as starfish, slugs, fish, octopus, squid, birds, bipeds, gibbons, blobs (???), rolling armadillos and caterpillars (they exist), stingrays and other creative movements.

GamerXA wrote:

Isn't the similar gaits for similar bodies achieved because of convergent evolution.

Also, how do you intend to achieve procedural gaits with radically different organisms such as starfish, slugs, fish, octopus, squid, birds, bipeds, gibbons, blobs (???), rolling armadillos and caterpillars (they exist), stingrays and other creative movements.

By going through the same procedure as this

Quote :

In the beginning, there will be certain types of creatures that will have extremely odd gaits.
You submit a bug report, along with the creature file, and i'll add a patch to account for whatever i didn't before that caused the odd gait.

You want to manually edit animations?

Go to http://www.blender.org/ download it, download the pre-rigged human model here: http://e2-productions.com/repository/modules/PDdownloads/visit.php?agree=1&lid=376&cid=1
Now, animate it realistically.

Already tried animating organisms realistically in Blender. I'm not saying that the player will have to manually edit every Organism motion, evolution would be able evolve them, as in nature.

By your method, every type of gait will have to be programmed to be procedurally done, this sounds a lot like Spore turned out and also seems to limit almost every aspect of the Editor that we have aimed to make the player be able to be alien in.

GamerXA wrote:

Already tried animating organisms realistically in Blender. I'm not saying that the player will have to manually edit every Organism motion, evolution would be able evolve them, as in nature.

By your method, every type of gait will have to be programmed to be procedurally done, this sounds a lot like Spore turned out and also seems to limit almost every aspect of the Editor that we have aimed to make the player be able to be alien in.

It's not predefining how it would be. It's fixing what problem happened to the procedural animation to make it appear strange.

GamerXA wrote:

Already tried animating organisms realistically in Blender. I'm not saying that the player will have to manually edit every Organism motion, evolution would be able evolve them, as in nature.

By your method, every type of gait will have to be programmed to be procedurally done, this sounds a lot like Spore turned out and also seems to limit almost every aspect of the Editor that we have aimed to make the player be able to be alien in.

It's been said before, NOTHING in Spore was procedural. Not all creatures will have the same gait in this game; they'll have the one that makes the ABSOLUTE most sense. I'm happy with what we're going to get.

Spore had a ton of procedurals, they just weren't at the level we need. Bashi's system sounds excellent to me, at least for vertebrates. But we'll work on others later.

~sciocont wrote:

Spore had a ton of procedurals, they just weren't at the level we need. Bashi's system sounds excellent to me, at least for vertebrates. But we'll work on others later.

Oh. I guess it was. But yes, Bashi's system sounds exactly like what we need!

Bashi's method should be used for the default gait of terrestrial vertebrates with bilateral symmetrically placed legs that the player solely creates with the Editor. But I still believe that Organisms will have to evolve movement strategies by themselves.

GamerXA wrote:

Bashi's method should be used for the default gait of terrestrial vertebrates with bilateral symmetrically placed legs that the player solely creates with the Editor. But I still believe that Organisms will have to evolve movement strategies by themselves.

Well, as they evolve, their body form changes, and, in turn, so would their gait.

We should not attempt to create a procedural algorithm for every possible circumstance that the player may create. Specific gaits are evolved in slight ways to account for specific environments that would be almost impossible to generate by these procedurals. Snakes in the desert for example, raise the center of their body off the ground to reduce contact with the hot soil.

GamerXA wrote:

We should not attempt to create a procedural algorithm for every possible circumstance that the player may create. Specific gaits are evolved in slight ways to account for specific environments that would be almost impossible to generate by these procedurals. Snakes in the desert for example, raise the center of their body off the ground to reduce contact with the hot soil.

So if we don't do it based on the structure of the organism, how do we do it? Remember that Darwinian Evolution is probably going to be too taxing on a regular computer to recreate in the game, so we can't implement a simple method of movement evolution.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

GamerXA wrote:

We should not attempt to create a procedural algorithm for every possible circumstance that the player may create. Specific gaits are evolved in slight ways to account for specific environments that would be almost impossible to generate by these procedurals. Snakes in the desert for example, raise the center of their body off the ground to reduce contact with the hot soil.

So if we don't do it based on the structure of the organism, how do we do it? Remember that Darwinian Evolution is probably going to be too taxing on a regular computer to recreate in the game, so we can't implement a simple method of movement evolution.

We could let players tweak procedurally generated movements through the animation editor.

~sciocont wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

So if we don't do it based on the structure of the organism, how do we do it? Remember that Darwinian Evolution is probably going to be too taxing on a regular computer to recreate in the game, so we can't implement a simple method of movement evolution.

We could let players tweak procedurally generated movements through the animation editor.

As a player, i don't want to have to create movement animations. And how would the AI tweak itself?

AI could mutate, tweak through natural selection. Player could tweak movements easily as they happen in test mode..