The Price of Ecstasy is Going Up!

Hey everybody,

BrokeAss Games is here to announce that the first phase of our Early Adopter period (the Special Torque Early Adopter Love edition) is wrapping up this Monday just in time for SIGGRAPH.
As of next week, the Early Adopter price will be $149, which will last until final release comes out at the end of the year, but we wanted to make sure to give you all in the Torque community a little warning so you can grab it now if you're planning on it.

Forgive me if I'm a little incoherent right now but I've been up for three days working on our new promo video:


Along with all the bling in there you might notice a few interesting Ecstasy features that I haven't publicly blogged about before.

First, you can now record animations on a whole set of bots at once! This makes it easy to record whole scenes at one time. Each bot saves out its own dsq file, with all the ragdoll physics and whatever else affected that bot in particular, and then you can either load them up play the whole scene back in Ecstasy or save them all out as BVH files to play the scene in another application. The scene with the military characters getting blown up in the above video makes use of this feature.

Second, I got the weapons working with PhysX triggers(!) so now you can effectively beat down any animated bot in Ecstasy with any weapon that is properly set up for physics. See example below:


Third, we now support "Biped-friendly BVH", meaning you can export your BVH files in a format that loads quickly and easily onto a Biped-rigged character in 3DStudio Max. Proof is offered below:


I've also made great strides toward support for Autodesk's FBX format, which will enable Maya users to directly import Ecstasy output into their projects. This won't be done till sometime after SIGGRAPH next week, but the FBX SDK is compiled in and the process is started, so be ready for it!

Finally, last but not least, those old-time Garage Gamers who've known me since I came on board will not be surprised by this but others might: I finally got around to fully enabling my Genetic Algorithm system in Ecstasy. What it does is allows you to define up to six fitness parameters in script, and an action file that tells Ecstasy what bodyparts you wish to train and what action you want them to start with, if any. It then uses this information to start testing random motions on the affected bodyparts and measuring the result. Those motions that come closer to success get rewarded, and on the next round of testing the movement hopefully comes closer to the desired result.

It looks something like this in the code:

datablock gaFitnessData(korkLeftFootForward)
{
   BodypartName = "Bip01 L Foot";
   PositionGoal = "-0.2 1.0 0.5";
   PositionGoalType = "1 0 0";
   RotationGoal = 0.0;
   RotationGoalType = 0;   
};

datablock gaActionUserData(Kork_AU)
{
   MutationChance = 0.20;//0.25
   MutationAmount = 0.15;//0.2
   NumPopulations = 1;
   MigrateChance = 0.0;
   NumActionSets = 8;
   NumSequenceReps = 1;
   NumRestSteps = 30;
   ObserveInterval = 8;
   ActionName = "leftLeg.kick";
   FitnessData1 = "korkRightFootForward";
};
datablock fxFlexBodyData(Kork)
{
   shapeFile	= "art/shapes/players/TorqueOrc/TorqueOrc.dts";
   ...
   GA = true;
   ActionUserData = Kork_AU;
};

Theoretically you could randomly create any movement you want using this system, but it's still very experimental, I wouldn't plan on firing all your animators quite yet. :-) It's a kick in the pants to play around with, though, and I'll definitely be spending a lot of time in the future improving and tweaking on this system.

For people already on board, most of these new changes have not made it into the client version yet because I've been frantically getting ready for SIGGRAPH for, well, about the last month... but rest assured, if it doesn't happen before I leave then as soon as I get back , you will have a big pile of updates waiting!

Chris