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Ragdoll Pack Preview

Name:	Chris Calef
Date Posted:	Jan 29, 2005
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Well, hey again! It took me a little longer than planned to overcome some of the ODE obstacles (hint to anyone new to ODE: if things just don't make any sense at all, try scaling everything up ten times) but I'm finally looking at a Kork in the torque demo environment who can get blown all over the place, and I have to say, it feels good!!

Not that I'm in favor of blowing people up -- if you feel bad for Kork, you'll be happy to know I dropped the crossbow damage to only one point, so this definitely doesn't qualify as "torture" under the rules of the current administration!

Anyway, check out the rest here:

Recent Blog Posts

List:	05/14/08 - Fun with BVH Files, in Torque. 03/12/08 - Hello, Goodbye, Israel, and LSystems 04/30/07 - The Grand Canyon is really, really, really big. 12/07/05 - Torque Build Environment (TBE) Changes Course 09/13/05 - Ragdoll Pack Gets Multiple Character Support 04/08/05 - Ragdoll Pack Is SHIPPED!! 02/24/05 - Ragdoll Pack On The Way 01/29/05 - Ragdoll Pack Preview

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David Montgomery-Blake (Jan 29, 2005 at 02:24 GMT)

Ooooh fun!

Chris "DiGi" Timberlake (Jan 29, 2005 at 03:53 GMT)

Very Nice Mr. Calef. I'm working on a map editor, and I think itd be cool to tie make a brush an ODE object, VIA entity. Maybe we should talk? Look for details in my next plan, which I will prob write tonight.

Edit: I just noticed your an associate. Your prob have better things to do.
Edited on Jan 29, 2005 03:54 GMT

Michael Cozzolino (Jan 29, 2005 at 05:21 GMT)

Kork go boom :)

Josiah Wang (Jan 29, 2005 at 14:50 GMT)

Bye BYe Korky! lol

quickie question though, if I were playing as torque and i got knocked down by the blast, how would it look like through first and third person view?

Adam deGrandis (Jan 29, 2005 at 15:01 GMT)

Wow, those look great! How does the engine select which animation to play?

Pat Wilson (Jan 29, 2005 at 19:51 GMT)

In Tribes and Tribes 2 it would get where the damage was applied from, and then apply the closest match for a death animation. For example, if you shoot someone in the face with a sniper rifle in Tribes they will grab their face and fall to their knees etc.

Chris Calef (Jan 29, 2005 at 22:48 GMT)

Re: how it chooses the animation -- it's just script, I haven't had to go under the hood for this yet, although I might if I can't solve my current problem. I wrote a chooseSequence function that I call from radiusDamage, and it (will) use the slope, direction and magnitude of force to pick an appropriate animation.

Re: how it looks from first/third person, it looks as you would expect. When you're third person, the camera flies back with the player, and you see him toss up in the air and land.

The way it's set up right now, you have to stay still to go thru the whole sequence, if you start running right away it will interrupt the ragdoll sequence and let you keep running, though you will have been blasted off track a little bit. I like it this way, it keeps the ragdoll as cool eye candy without it getting in the way of play.

However, I have a problem, and would be ecstatic if anybody knows the answer: is there a limit to how many player sequences there can be defined in player.cs? When I get around 30-35, depending on which sequences I'm trying to include, it crashes with a "write out of range" error. Anybody know what's going on there?
(still researching it on the forums.)

Jorgen Ewelonn (Jan 30, 2005 at 02:41 GMT)

Great seeing progress on this Chris, hope you'll be able to release it *soon*

@Pat: Any chance that "function" was made in script ???

Adam deGrandis (Jan 30, 2005 at 20:58 GMT)

Oh yeah.... I feel kind of dumb. I should have been able to figure that one out.

Anyway, again, awesome work, Chris. :)

Chris Calef (Jan 31, 2005 at 03:04 GMT)

@Adam: thanks! Looks like I've hit a wall with the whole "it's all just script" idea, though. Works great until you need more than a small number of animations (see discussion under forum post "Limits to total number of animation sequences?") So it'll have to be an engine and script conversion to make this work. I tried to keep it simple, anyway.

Chris Calef (Feb 01, 2005 at 05:50 GMT)

PS the sequence limit issue is more or less solved for now, at least to the point of being able to use up to sixty or so. If you're curious about this check out [url] http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=25552 [/url] this thread.

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