Interesting Animation Info . . .

Scott, you're a credit to the community (even more so, in fact). So many of the criticisms of T3 were based around player movement that this could be a huge advance.

New Horizon on 23/3/2006 at 23:26

Quote Posted by GlasWolf

Scott, you're a credit to the community (even more so, in fact). So many of the criticisms of T3 were based around player movement that this could be a huge advance.

I agree! You have made some very great discoveries. The community will hopefully take this knowledge and make good with it.

I sincerely hope that someday we will see a completely new set of models ingame, comeplete with the classic Thief animations ported into T3.

Gestalt on 23/3/2006 at 23:37

I'd rather see new animations to be honest, unless you just mean the player anims.

Thanks for your hard work, ascottk! This should open up a lot of new possibilities.

ascottk on 24/3/2006 at 00:14

Quote Posted by Gestalt

I'd rather see new animations to be honest, unless you just mean the player anims.

Thanks for your hard work, ascottk! This should open up a lot of new possibilities.

What animations would we want to see?

Anyway, here's my list of pet peeves (OM animations):

* Drunken Garrett walk (fixed, these may need peer review)
* Leaning (fixed, may also needs testing). Also, I may need to tweak the header node bone (light gem seems to be based on that), so the further you lean, the less likely you're in the light. In other words, the header node should move less than the rest of the body. Right now the new animations works pretty well without looking awkward.
* Dumb throwing animations (not a priority)
* Awkward bow sighting (I think they should be more like T1/2. I'm not sure how to fix that yet)
* No rope climbing animations (I tried incorporating them but I think the code was removed)
* Gamal's puppy dog run (not a priority)
* Non-combat AIs' fearful animations. Just looks silly.
* Stupid cat walks around too fast (easily fixed without a source file with ActorX). Only needs to lessen the frame rate value.
* Rough animations in general

I wonder if the sword can be reimplemented? Blocking an attack could be just as easy as turning, since we probably can't add new key bindings and animations. Who knows? This might be the tip of the iceberg.

Crispy on 24/3/2006 at 00:23

Quote Posted by ascottk

No rope climbing animations (I tried incorporating them but I think the code was removed)

That's a shame. :( That and the leaning thing were the only real problems I had with the animation, personally. The movement annoyed me a little, but only if I made an effort to notice it. :p

It would be nice if the cat used all of the animations that were mentioned earlier in this thread - sitting down and washing itself, that sort of thing. Not a high priority of course.

New Horizon on 24/3/2006 at 02:56

Shadowspawn brought this up in another thread. It's something I would personally love to see.

Quote:

One of the reasons I'm looking into this is a cross fertilization of motions between T2 and T3. The walking in T2 looked much more natural, and we have so many more motions to choose from. (Instead of having to animate every new motion we want.) Of course, any motion information would have to be scaled, re-mapped, computed, mashed, and baked into the other format, but we could just select the joints we wanted to import and fix the existing motions.

The animations in the first two games were so great. Very fluid and lifelike. If we could get those into T3...wow.

Shadowspawn on 24/3/2006 at 02:58

We'll probably have to modify the ladder climbing motions into a rope climb, unless the animations are there and just not accessible. (Remember all the cool motions included in T2 but weren't accessible via the motion DB).

Eventually we should be able to move some of the T2 motions to T3. I'm working on breaking open the motion formats so we can remap and transplant motions from one engine to another. It will take some time, and I've got plenty on my plate. As my first trick, I hope to move the cat animations to T2. That will get me familiar enough with that is going on with the motion formats, not to mention getting a big row going on the T2 forums.

ascottk on 24/3/2006 at 03:06

Quote Posted by Shadowspawn

We'll probably have to modify the ladder climbing motions into a rope climb, unless the animations are there and just not accessible.

Actually, it looks like the jumping animation is the one used when climbing a mesh with the blsRope property.