Progress update Nov 21

Quick  update on progress to date.

Char­ac­ter Test Rig

Did up a quick test rig of the sol­dier so that I can start to get weapons setup in-game.  Turned out pretty well, even for a 5 minute rig­ging job.  He has some obvi­ous issues, but is suf­fi­cient for test­ing purposes.

What this gives me how­ever is a basic setup that I can use to start putting both ani­ma­tions & weapons together, both of which are pro­gress­ing fairly well.

Weapon Setup

Got a cou­ple of sim­ple ani­ma­tions exported so that I can run around my weapon’s range (test world) and check to see that all of the weapons are work­ing fine. So far I have the M4, SCAR and Aug setup and func­tional — and now that I have gone through the process a cou­ple of times the rest will go pretty quick.  Mostly just a mat­ter of get­ting the weapons rotated prop­erly and re-exporting them so that they line up prop­erly with the char­ac­ter when attached to his hand.

Each weapon has the pickup & player ver­sions ready to go (ie w_ and p_ ver­sions for the half-life mod­ders in the crowd).  Both ver­sions use the exact same model once exported, which sim­pli­fies things a bit — at least for now.  I may do a lower-poly ver­sions for the world / pickup weapon and/or a high­er­poly ver­sion for the player ver­sion or some­thing, but for the time being it looks good enough.

Col­li­sion Hitboxes

The final big piece of news is that we fleshed out how hit­boxes are going to work with the game.  Hit­boxes were always a bit of an anom­aly as they are tech­ni­cally col­li­sion objects, but they are col­li­sion objects that only col­lide with things like bul­lets and pro­jec­tiles.  The player has a sep­a­rate type of col­li­sion mesh that is used to actu­ally move them through the world (so they fall based on grav­ity etc).

What we’ve come up with is basi­cally a sys­tem where each col­li­sion object that you add to an object can be a mem­ber of a spe­cific type of col­li­sion group.  When doing col­li­sion checks, only objects in the spe­cific group that is defined will gen­er­ate col­li­sions (and col­li­sion call­backs for ‘con­tact pro­jec­tiles like rock­ets etc’).  This lets us be as spe­cific as we want (or not) for hit boxes.  Rag­doll is slightly dif­fer­ent, but also on my todo list.  I know how I want to do it, just a mat­ter of get­ting to it ;}

Detailed Mate­r­ial Options

The final thing that I got done this week is final­iz­ing the setup of the character’s mate­ri­als — basi­cally the issue was how to set up the char­ac­ters so that I can not only sim­pli­fiy devel­op­ment, but also have as much cus­tomiza­tion options avail­able as pos­si­ble.  Well, I think I’ve come up with a solu­tion at least for the character’s body. So the idea is that each player will have the abil­ity to cus­tomize their char­ac­ter, includ­ing what kind of camo they are wear­ing etc.

So that’s basi­cally what I’ve setup — which isn’t too com­pli­cated, but the cool part is the ‘how’ (at least to me).  GameCore sup­ports mul­ti­ple lay­ers per sur­face — in essence allow­ing any num­ber of passes to be done per sur­face.  Each layer has a com­plete set of dif­fuse / nor­mal / spec­u­lar maps that can be applied and blended together how­ever you want.  This gives us an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful mate­r­ial sys­tem and, from the artis­tic stand­point, lets me do just about any­thing I want with the sur­faces, includ­ing hav­ing mul­ti­ple nor­mal maps lay­ered together, cus­tom UV scale / coor­di­nates per layer etc.

This lets me swap out the dif­fer­erent types of camo mate­r­ial seper­ately from the over­all body nor­mal map etc.  Looks pretty sweet in-game.

Ani­ma­tion Organization

The final thing that has been started is the orga­ni­za­tion of ani­ma­tions for the char­ac­ters.  A while back I pur­chased a library of motion cap­ture ani­ma­tion data, which includes some excel­lent shots for the var­i­ous types of move­ment that I want the sol­diers to have, includ­ing crawls / walks / etc.

The biggest thing that I am hop­ing to achieve with the game is some­thing that Call of Duty cap­tured well — the fact that Spe­cial Forces sol­diers have a very unique tech­nique of move­ment com­pared to tra­di­tional sol­diers.  You can see this in movies like Black­hawk Down and TV Shows such as The Unit (two major inspi­ra­tions for this game).  The move­ment is extremely smooth and you can just tell that these sol­diers are much more pro­fes­sional than their typ­i­cal infantry cohorts.  Cap­tur­ing this in the game is a pri­mary goal of mine.

The sec­ond goal of the ani­ma­tion sys­tem is to setup a proper ‘lay­ered’ ani­ma­tion tree.  With GameCore, we have the abil­ity to spec­ify any num­ber of ani­ma­tion ‘Chan­nels’, which will be uti­lized quite a bit in this game.  Chan­nel 0 is the basic char­ac­ter move­ment (lower-body ani­ma­tions) where the higher chan­nels will be used to con­trol upper-body and head move­ments.  Our ani­matino blend­ing sys­tem is pretty slick, and should allow me to pro­duce fairly com­plex ani­ma­tion tree’s with­out much work.  The default char­ac­ter exam­ple that we’ve pro­duced for the engine already pro­vides this kind of lay­er­ing, it’s just a mat­ter of me cre­at­ing the cus­tomized ani­ma­tions that I want for the game.

The final note about ani­ma­tions, is that each weapon can have it’s own set of cus­tom ani­ma­tions — so depend­ing on whether the char­ac­ter is hold­ing an SMG, a pis­tol or an assault rifle, they can move & react accord­ingly.  This com­bined with the lay­ered ani­ma­tions should result in a pretty sweet motion sys­tem for the characters.

Any­ways, off to work on some ani­ma­tions — want to get the basic move­ment set done today and hope­fully a first pass on a cou­ple of base upper body psoes for the weapons. If all goes accord­ing to plan, I’ll see about cap­tur­ing a video of the char­ac­ter in action.

No related posts.