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Its good to be an indie.
Its good to be an indie.
| Name: | Gareth Fouche |  |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Feb 01, 2007 | |
| Rating: |  3.3 out of 5 | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
| RSS Feed: |  or Subscribe with  . | |
| Profile Page: | View profile page for Gareth Fouche |
Blog post
You know, sometimes it hits home just how cool it is to be part of the indie community.
Yesterday, I was discussing my RPG design with some of my friends, in particular I was talking about combat. In most RPGs, its a case of swinging at your opponent until they lose all their hitpoints and fall over. I would like to implement something a bit more interesting than that, something like what you see in books/movies. In those, you don't have people whacking chunks out of each other for 5 minutes. Instead, most of the combat revolves around feints and parries, trying to get your opponent off balance/off guard so you can then deliver a fatal strike while they are weakened.
Anyway, it was fun to think about a potential system along those lines, but I came back down to earth and told the guys "yeah, that could be pretty fun, but it would require a lot of extra animation work, and I have so many other things to do, I don't think I'll get to it". Basically, that system only works if you have a good way of representing to the player that their enemy is weakened, and ready for a finishing blow.
And then, today, browsing GG, I clicked on the link to Torque Motion. I'd seen it before, glancingly, but hadn't been thinking about animation then, so hadn't thought too much of it.
Now, I was more interested. I watched the video, and was blown away! Not only are the animations (including crawling, tumbling, climbing and swimming) incredible, they have lots of "wounded, holding your sides and limping" animations. Which would be perfect to use for the "off guard"/vulnerable animations! Basically, if you get into a fight with a humanoid, when they switch to those damaged animations, you know they are open for a "finishing blow". Perfect! And saves me huge amounts of time/effort.
Moments like that really highlight the benefits of working in a cool indie community like GG. And thanks Chiang Mai for their great work!
Yesterday, I was discussing my RPG design with some of my friends, in particular I was talking about combat. In most RPGs, its a case of swinging at your opponent until they lose all their hitpoints and fall over. I would like to implement something a bit more interesting than that, something like what you see in books/movies. In those, you don't have people whacking chunks out of each other for 5 minutes. Instead, most of the combat revolves around feints and parries, trying to get your opponent off balance/off guard so you can then deliver a fatal strike while they are weakened.
Anyway, it was fun to think about a potential system along those lines, but I came back down to earth and told the guys "yeah, that could be pretty fun, but it would require a lot of extra animation work, and I have so many other things to do, I don't think I'll get to it". Basically, that system only works if you have a good way of representing to the player that their enemy is weakened, and ready for a finishing blow.
And then, today, browsing GG, I clicked on the link to Torque Motion. I'd seen it before, glancingly, but hadn't been thinking about animation then, so hadn't thought too much of it.
Now, I was more interested. I watched the video, and was blown away! Not only are the animations (including crawling, tumbling, climbing and swimming) incredible, they have lots of "wounded, holding your sides and limping" animations. Which would be perfect to use for the "off guard"/vulnerable animations! Basically, if you get into a fight with a humanoid, when they switch to those damaged animations, you know they are open for a "finishing blow". Perfect! And saves me huge amounts of time/effort.
Moments like that really highlight the benefits of working in a cool indie community like GG. And thanks Chiang Mai for their great work!
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 08/19/08 - Korrinport Reloaded 07/18/08 - SoW - More concept art 07/09/08 - It may not be Oblivion... 06/24/08 - Celebratory 05/13/08 - The Gingerbread Villa 04/14/08 - SoW - Some concept art 04/02/08 - Blog of War 02/28/08 - Scars of Bloom |
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Submit your own resources!| Dave Young (Feb 01, 2007 at 12:58 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Nick Zafiris (Feb 01, 2007 at 13:27 GMT) |
Nick
| Aun Taraseina (Feb 01, 2007 at 13:42 GMT) |
*evil mode on* The Torque Motion:: Basic Animation Pack will be aviable very soon.
The first pack will be based on the Kork model , other character pack will follow. */evil mode off*
:)
Aun.
Edited on Feb 01, 2007 13:43 GMT
| Michael Perry (Feb 01, 2007 at 13:44 GMT) |
Quark's skeleton is actually a great rig, and any artist worth his mettle can attach a new mesh and re-skin the rig. Add in the Torque Motion pack, and you've got a massive starting point for immersible character interaction.
| Graham Evans (Feb 01, 2007 at 13:54 GMT) |
I did exactly the same Gareth.... Since every character I have uses the orc skelly this instantluy becomes a requirement not just a nice to have.
With all the arcane fx and these anims, the big question now is do we hit a limit on number of anims???
Guess I will find out this weekend :)
Anyhoo... Hope you got my email. And congrats to all on this pack
Rregards
Graham Evans
| Dave Young (Feb 01, 2007 at 14:08 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
Yes! It's good to be an indie :)
@Aun: It's already available lol I just bought it...
| Graham Evans (Feb 01, 2007 at 14:45 GMT) |
Yep root pose is hard, butttt. There's a really good replacement root pose on evi's char packs which also use the Orc skelly.
So far I have found that to be the answer for me;)
I will be very interested to see how these anims work on these character packs.
Regards
Graham
| Dave Young (Feb 01, 2007 at 16:01 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Chris Calef (Feb 01, 2007 at 18:58 GMT) |
Quote:
the big question now is do we hit a limit on number of anims???
Actually, I can speak to this one: yes, there is a limit, but it's a sort of surprising one, or at least might be. The limit has to do with the length of the _names_ of the sequences. I ran into this problem with the ragdoll animation pack. The problem is that stock torque wants to send all the sequence names in one packet, and a packet has a size limit of about 2K bytes. This means that with normal sequence naming conventions, you top out at about forty or fifty anims.
The solution I found for this problem was two-pronged.
First, I created the following define in TSShapeConstruct.cc:
#define TS_IS_RELATIVE_SEQUENCES 0
If you set that to "1" instead of "0", what it will do is drop the explicit path from the sequence names (i.e. "~/data/shapes/player/___.dsq") and instead assumes that all the sequences for each model are stored in the same directory as the model. This eliminates a lot of repetitive characters.
Second, if necessary you can come up with a naming convention for your sequences that uses very few characters. I just used numbers for mine: 102.dsq, 103.dsq, etc. which is hard to read, but with three character names, I've tested out at up to 456 sequences crammed into one model.
Of course, somebody could write a sequence manager system for Torque that would get rid of the single-packet limit, but with minimal changes my system will work.
Glad those anims are available now, aren't they great? Three cheers for Torque!
Chris
| Graham Evans (Feb 02, 2007 at 02:40 GMT) |
Looks like I might be writing some code this weekend to organise and arrange sequences to get within the number limits:)
Regards
Graham
| Mark (Feb 02, 2007 at 03:47 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Leslie Young (Feb 02, 2007 at 06:46 GMT) |
Thanks for that info Chris, think I'll modify that #define tonight and start renaming my animations. :p
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