Well I am still going through the process of making my own game.
This isn't so easy, infact it's effin' hard so I take my hats off to anyone that likes to code.
Having said that I am still a gamer and I have been following Warhammer recently as it is the next big MMO release this year.
While I like AoC, it isn't going to hold a candle to the polish seen in Warhammer. Feel free to disagree at your leisure.
But that wans't what caught my eye, what did was something that caught me as odd. The lack of produral animation on the side of Chaos. By this I mean that I feel Mythic missed the boat by not going down the route of using procedural animation techniques ala spore to create a true mutations or gifts of Chaos to players.
Can you imagine having real random (yet not too random) mutations? an extra arm? a scorpian tail? your head in your chest? extra joints? more than 5 fingers? 2 heads!
Personally, if I want to create mutants in a game, I'd go for procedural animation over the handcrafted traditional style. While it is harder to implememnt and it can sometimes lack the polish only a good animator can give to a subject, it could really open up the possibilites and colour within games.
hey ho back to the grindstone.
Is this like some sort of comparison between the standard dead animation and a ragdoll one?
Tue Aug 26 2008 3:39PM ReportHere's the thing, animations are based on skeletons and numbers of joints. The more bones(joints) on a model the more processing it takes to render it's animations. Players tend to have the most bones or large raid bosses. Even unibody or the deformation systems of todays slider character creations are just lattices which deform the displacement of verts key frames in an animation.
To wholly change the physical construction of a model makes it's animated rig change, requiring more bones or less, or of a totally new structure. Add the attachments of wearables which attach to the head slot, arm, etc.. and you have more confusion.
Spore uses a very complex weight system which allows for simple movement but does not support more complex object interaction or attachable elements. It's like working with NURBS.
Tue Aug 26 2008 4:14PM ReportWhile this sort of deformation allows for a variety of models, and interesting figures you know there are limits to the number of bones in the models as well as animations. A spore creature cannot swing a sword and convey velocity and strength. That sort of thing has to be hand animated and a procedural skeleton rig won't work with hand animation.
MMORPG.com writes:
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