Procedural Animations

This is going to take place slightly further down the line, but I felt it nessicary to bring up before this turns around and bites us in the Belgium.

Obviously one of the biggest challenges for making the OE is going to be makinng the myriad of possible creatures move and interact with their world in a way that looks realistic.

Looking back on spore, I notice that the major issue they had was that they appear to have used one universal animation procedure for all creatures in the game. It's actually very interesting to compare and contrast the animations that you see in the various itterations of the game. (Try comparing this to the full release.)

This meant that while some body shapes animated quite well, others looked awkward and broke immersion.

While this may be impossible to make compatible with NPCevo, I think it might be in our favor to have multiple procedures for animation, which the player at least can pick and choose from to suit their desires.

Now, moving on to a bigger issue. If I understand correctly, roadkillguy may be our savior, but he is not a God and his powers are limited. The current projects of merely putting together an engine are incredibly difficult and taxing in the extreme. We want this game made, but we also want it made well. There are certain things that may be nigh impossible to change once implemented into the code. (For example, it seems unlikely that we could go back and add destructable terrain a la From Dust if we don't put it in from the start.)

I don't really have a solution for this problem. We need more resources to work with to really do what we're talking about. Easily anyway. Any thoughts?

The hardest part of procedural animation will just be writing the code, since we already have rigged skeletons and my joint system (which I will post soon) really helps determine how joints can move.

~sciocont wrote:

The hardest part of procedural animation will just be writing the code, since we already have rigged skeletons and my joint system (which I will post soon) really helps determine how joints can move.

While this will be a pain to code, thats not the problem. The hardest part by far is comming up with a system/implementation. Early spore videos talked about doing this in various ways, but judging by the final result they largely abondoned their efforts.

My best suggestion for a place to start is using IK chains, whereby you move a creatures 'foot' in a way which moves it forwards, and joint information takes care of the rest of the animation. The same foot movement (with some minor variations, perhaps based on a creatures activity or mass) could be used for most creatures, but I don't know whether it would be possible to base other animations on this.

@~scio - sorry, I looked back and noticed that your bone system may help with this, I'll wait till you post it to have a look, should be interesting.

Even with the bone system, we're going to be running quite a bit of math to determine that x part moving x degrees causes y part to move y degrees... of course, just about any animation we use is going to do that.

Not to mention that we also have the issue of how swimming, slithering, jumping and other non-walking animations will work.

Poisson wrote:

Not to mention that we also have the issue of how swimming, slithering, jumping and other non-walking animations will work.

Swimming is easily handled by the new joint concept. The muscle procedure will be up soon as well.

It's reverse kinematics... you move the end and then calculate where all the other joints would be. I could do it with basic opengl lines, but I don't know how to render a mesh to a skeleton dynamically. I'm sure there's classes that handle this, but I honestly don't know of any.

roadkillguy wrote:

It's reverse kinematics... you move the end and then calculate where all the other joints would be. I could do it with basic opengl lines, but I don't know how to render a mesh to a skeleton dynamically. I'm sure there's classes that handle this, but I honestly don't know of any.

Well, if we can get the lines down we'll be a Belgium side closer.