[MUD-Dev] Better Combat (long)

[Zach Collins (Siege)]

On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, David Kennerly wrote:

> By the way, if this were a graphic game, by the way, that several
> times more animations than the largest game I've heard of.  You
> could argue for procedural animation.  At the current leaps and
> bounds of graphics, could the techonology support real-time
> rendering about 1000 animation poses with several times as many
> transition animations sometime this decade?  I don't know the
> state of the art of graphics programming.

It's not graphics programmers in this case; it's modellers.
Skeleton based modelling such as in Half-Life greatly simplifies the
requirements for animating characters; if we say that HL's quality
of animation is enough to work with, we then have to look at
"tweening" engines and motion capture systems to help refine the
animations.  Combine these technologies with data streaming and the
presumed time it might take to learn a special maneuver, and we have
this model:

A player decides to learn the 'disarm' skill.  The skill is
practiced up (a random disarm animation is downloaded to be
displayed during the required practice time and others gradually
streamed in as bandwidth constraints allow), and then tried out in
battle.  Because a disarming technique requires specific sorts of
maneuvering and doesn't work with every weapon, it may be a while
before the character can actually perform one successfully - and
because we have a limited number of confirmed disarm animations,
perhaps only the successfully downoaded animations can be used for
the disarm technique (meaning the player still needs time to
understand how to apply it to other stances and weapons).

Cost of animation using boned models will be higher because of the
extra time spent, but not as high as if graphic artists had to draw
everything by hand, or if modellers had to personally deform each
model's surface throughout a given animation.

Cost of CPU is nothing to worry about, because the player's CPU
isn't doing all the tweening.  That was done in development.

--
Zach Collins
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