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46

Technical forum / Re: Problem with walking animation

« on: November 26, 2007, 02:35:43 PM »

Hmmm... I can't say I understand... and I don't really remember how the tentacle used to move in MM, it's been a long time since DOTT... What is a "passing phase"? And is there really a place for stand-frames in a normal human being's walking cycle?

What about my main question though? Should the first frame in a walking loop be the one with one leg fully outstretched in a full step motion?

47

Technical forum / Re: Particles and regions

« on: November 26, 2007, 10:46:40 AM »

Ok, I managed on my own regarding the UseRegion. Works great!

Anything about my second question regarding decoration regions for particles?

48

Technical forum / Particles and regions

« on: November 25, 2007, 05:32:11 PM »

Hello,

Can someone please explain how UseRegion works in a particle emitter? How do you set the region that the particles are visible in? If I want to see snow, for instance, through a star-shaped window, and only see the snow inside the star, does UseRegion help me achieve this effect?

And talking about particles, can specific particles look different when entering a certain region? Like maybe receive a color mask when inside the region like the actor can receive when inside a decoration region. Is this possible?

49

Technical forum / Re: Problem with walking animation

« on: November 25, 2007, 03:15:20 PM »

The first frame of my walking animation is the actor with one of his legs slightly lifted and a bent knee. Is this a problem, you think? What do you mean by step-frame as the first frame? Should the first frame be the one with one leg fully outstretched in a full step motion?

Now regarding the stand-frames that you mentioned, I'm a bit confused. How can such frames exist at all in a walking animation? I mean, this animation is a loop and in a walking loop no frame at all should be a stand-frame. Do you mind explaining what you meant?

50

Technical forum / Pathfinding

« on: November 25, 2007, 10:22:00 AM »

Hello,

I'm a bit puzzled by the reaction of my 3D actor to clicks around my scene (I use the "Find path using 2D elements only" option). When I click on my "floor" region the actor walks to that point just fine. Now when I click on any non-interactive areas in my scene that are outside the "floor" region, my actor walks to some arbitrary location on the "floor" that apparently has nothing to do with where I made the click.

I have no idea what the problem is but more so, I don't even know what the correct behavior of an actor for when the user clicks on any other non-interactive part of the scene should be. Should the actor walk anywhere in such case?

51

Technical forum / Problem with walking animation

« on: November 25, 2007, 10:20:57 AM »

Hello,

I have a problem with the walking animation of my 3D actor. Every time he starts walking, he starts moving immediately but he does so without the walking animation. Only a bit later the walking animation kicks in. I think the problem is that he starts moving while the engine is making the transition between the idle animation and the walking animation. I tried to shorten the transition time between these two animations and although the "gliding" effect lessened a bit, the transition between the idle state and the walking state is now too abrupt and looks really bad (I mean, that's what the transition is for, after all).

What is the correct way to deal with this situation? Is there a way to cause the actor to start his actual moving only after the walking animation is actually playing and not during the transition?

52

Game design / Re: Character studio - all animations in one file

« on: November 25, 2007, 10:18:08 AM »

Do you mind explaining how to merge several bip files into one long sequence? I'm interested as well.

53

Technical forum / Re: Transition between animation channels

« on: November 19, 2007, 03:26:40 PM »

Because it would be hell to synchronize all the animation transitions in all the channels simultaneously?

Ok, fair enough. Can't argue with that logic


But I still need to know, is there no way in WME to smoothly play *one* special animation on top on an already playing animation, like in the example of a hand gesture at a certain point while talking? If it's possible after all, can someone explain how?

54

Technical forum / Re: Trouble with 3D actor turning animations

« on: November 19, 2007, 01:36:05 PM »

Well... I don't know... It looks a lot more elaborate than a slight leg/foot shuffle in the Overclocked demo... The whole body takes part in the turning animation. But you do seem to confirm my initial guess that the turning animation should be on the spot, without actually turning the actor. Is this correct?

55

Technical forum / Trouble with 3D actor turning animations

« on: November 19, 2007, 10:02:50 AM »

Hello,

I'm having some trouble with the turning animations of my 3D actor. I would appreciate it if someone could post some guidelines on how such animations should look like. For example, should they really turn the actor around or should they instead perform some in-place animation like the walking animation does? Will the engine still turn the actor around on his axis, once turning animations are defined for that actor, or will it leave that to the animation itself? How is it that such animations work and look fine for small angles but also for large angles?

Has anyone seen Overclocked yet? I checked out the German demo (http://download.house-of-tales.com/demos/OverclockedDemo_DE.exe) and the actor over there has some pretty neat turning animations. Does anybody know how should the actual animations look like in order to achieve such a turning effect?

56

Technical forum / Re: Transition between animation channels

« on: November 18, 2007, 12:33:03 PM »

No, the transitions only work within one channel. Multiple channels are not blended.

Ok... hours of testing just went flying out the window...

Is this by definition, by the way, that the smooth blending works only in the same channel? If so, is there a reasoning behind it? (and I mean other than "because it's coded that way" )

On a more practical note, is there another way to add small animations onto an underlying playing animation (like walk/talk/idle)? I mean, when the talk animation is playing, for instance, the character should make gestures with his hands at certain points to look believable, so what's the correct way of doing this?

And now that I think of it, what's the intended purpose of the animation channels?

57

Technical forum / Transition between animation channels

« on: November 18, 2007, 10:40:33 AM »

Should AnimTransitionTime or SetAnimTransitionTime work for smoothing animations between different animation channels of a 3D actor?

What I'm trying to do is playing a simple head-movement animation, from time to time, while the idle animation is playing. Since the idle animation plays on channel 0, I play the head-movement animation on channel 1 so that the two animations play together:

Code: [Select]

Actor.PlayAnimChannelAsync(1, "HeadMovement")
Now although it works pretty well (the actor moves its head while still playing the idle animation), there is still one problem. When the head-movement animation ends, the head snaps back to its position on the idle animation, which may be different than the end position of the head-movement animation. The result effect is that sometimes (depending on when during the idle animation the head-movement animation started) the actor's head jerks when the head-movement animation ends and it looks very unnatural (for a healthy person at least ).

Am I doing something wrong here? How should the head move back to its position in the idle animation after playing its own specialized short animation?

58

Feature requests, suggestions / Re: Resolution 16:10 and 4:3 handled automatically

« on: November 14, 2007, 03:51:39 PM »

I finally managed to find one graphic adapter (an Intel) that showed the game in its original resolution padded by a black border on all four sides. The effect was exactly what I wanted and it worked like a charm - the image was not distorted and the immersion remained intact. If all graphic adapters had this feature there wouldn't be any problem but unfortunately they don't. I even encountered some adapters having this feature in theory, but when activated - it didn't work.

Bottom line, I second Dudeldei in this request. A black border like that, activated through the Display tab in the Game settings application could be great. The black border option (something like "Keep original game resolution"), if activated by the user,  should either fill the rest of the screen with a black border to reach the current desktop resolution or maybe the target resolution can be selected as well from the Game settings application, although it's less important I think.

59

Technical forum / Re: Screen resolution

« on: November 14, 2007, 03:50:41 PM »

Dudeldei started a new thread on this topic in the Feature requests forum: http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=2487.0

60

Technical forum / Re: Screen resolution

« on: November 13, 2007, 11:20:28 AM »

After making some tests myself and after asking others to try and run my game on their systems, and after reading this recent GameBoomers thread http://www.gameboomers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&topic=15352, I've become convinced that my game will offer a significantly compromised experience for the vast majority of widescreen owners. Almost none of them had any feature, neither on their video adapter nor on their monitor, that provided them with the option to run the game in its original aspect ratio. Given the huge number of widescreen monitors out there, this has become a serious problem now and it keeps growing.

It could only be done if the game automatically recognizes the screen resolution and adds black bars (which means fake it, not overcome it). But this isn't as easy as it sounds and, again, I don't know of the game that can do this.

What are the actual problems involved in integrating such a solution into a game engine?