Plan for Jay Barnson

A couple of evenings in the life of a part-time indie. Continued.

So this is kind of a continuation / sequel / update on a couple of previous blog entries. The "new" project is not as new, but it's still very early and experimental. I'm very much in learning mode with Torque and with the content tools.

I'm still playing with Blender, but I'm not using it as a development tool CURRENTLY. It looks like it has all the power I need, but it's still a little over my head. I'm still much faster working with MilkShape + CharacterFX for now.

Anyway - here's a little sample of how my learning progress has gone. I'm not the kind of person who reads up on all the instructions first, understanding exactly what he is to do beforehand and then executing on his plan a step at a time. My methodology is more along the lines of creating a "to do" list of objectives, then diving in with both feet and making mistakes as I go. I just try and be careful so my mistakes don't lead to disaster (I wouldn't do this if I were writing a hard-drive formatting tool or a credit-card processor).

So here's my goal: I am working on a cut-scene. The cut scene has two characters driving in a car at night, stopping in front of a man in a white suit. Dialog ensues, and it ends with a murder. Good stuff. Or at least I hope so. In my mind it kicks serious butt, but something is always lost in translation to screen. Oh well. Maybe when Steven Spielburg turns it all into a movie, it'll be done right. (Sometime after "Tetris: The Movie!" is made, I'm guessing).

Now this is all "rough draft" stuff at this point - I'm not going to pretend ANYTHING that I'm doing right now is final work. But it should be enough to get the ball rolling. I already had the man in the white suit and the car (with the volumetric lights and so on) . Now I have a female and male model, already textured, but I need to put them in the car, and have the car drive forward, stopping at the man in the white suit. And I need to have some level of animation, so they don't look like statically posed Barbie and Ken dolls, and I need to have the camera move, zoom, pan, etc. in a scripted fashion.

I create a skeleton for the girl - I'm starting to get the hang of this. . I've been making extensive use of Psionic's Lowpoly Tutorials (http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/tutorials.html ) - so rather than explain what I'm doing (which is as likely wrong as right) I'll let him do it. My first attempt at doing a sitting animation for the girl come out really horribly - her arm is bent like it's broken. This is because my vertices aren't attached to the correct bones. I figured that much out all by myself. Another fifteen minutes or so, and while she's not PERFECT, she's not noticeably twisting about like ElastiGirl from The Incredibles, either. So I have one sitting animation frame that looks okay. I copy it and paste it ten frames later. Too few frames, I discover later, but oh, well. Then I copy it to an intermediate frame, make some minor changes to it, and now the animation cycle has the girl fidgeting slightly in her seat. Not perfect, but good enough for my purposes.

I export the file into Torque's format, and create a new datablock for the girl. I create a new instance of a player (not AIPlayer, though it really should be), put it next to the man in the white suit so I can see that it came into the game correctly. This is mostly a cut & paste effort from the Man in the White Suit's datablock. I run it.

It fails. No girl.

A few minutes of debugging leads me to discover that Torque couldn't find the girl's model - it was looking for the right model in the wrong directory. Cut & Paste - the source of so much productivity and so many errors. I clean this up and run again, and now the girl is standing there on the street, arms outstretched. No sitting animation yet. That's fine. Now I need to get her inside the car.

Misunderstanding the documentation and reading a bad example, I try and have the girl position herself in the car's passenger-side mount point. I try this:

%this.Charlotte.mountObject(%this.car,1);

No dice. Nothing happens. More reading of docs and not-so-bad example code, and I realize that the person doesn't mount the car - the car mounts the person inside it. I had it reversed. So I try this:

%this.car.mountObject(%this.Charlotte,1);

Much better. Now she's pretty much standing up on top of the seat in the car, her knees in the middle of the root. Facing backwards. Uh-huh. I modeled the car backwards, I have the mount points too high, and I'm not firing the girl's sitting animation.

I tear at it for most of the night. I get her to sit, lower the mount point, tweak the car a few times, and finally get her to face forward inside the car, right where she should be. Then I realize my scale is slightly off and that the car is a little too big. Changing the car's size is no big deal, but MilkShape doesn't give great controls for changing the joint (bone) positions automagically (if it does, PLEASE let me know!), so it's a little time intensive.

That little experience of adding a skeleton, creating the animation, and getting the girl inside the car facing the right way took a whole evening. If development always proceeded at that speed, I'd be seriously hosed. Fortunately, it speeds up. (To be continued...)

Jay Barnson
Rampant Games