Hey guys, as the topic says, what is so difficult about createing characters, an idle going to a walk, a jump from a run, the blending of movements ie sneak-walk-dash, adding a backflip to a jump, maybe a double jump from a light landing, timed emotes, leans, a collider that easily aligns to the environment, can be adjust based on height, rotation etc swimming, flying, climbing, attacking, hits etc.
Before answering please take out animating, modelling etc and keep it to the coding side. Is it because characters so complex need alot of planning, skills etc, why are nearly all indie games following a basic outline( barring odd exceptions), why is nothing coming close to aaa games? Why after a gazzillion mario fangames can noone come close to even mario 64.
Im interested to know as im not far off from announcing a product for unity which hopefully overcomes so many issues and will totally change all this. Hopefully lol
To be honest, a lot of the trouble isn’t an issue anymore thanks to Mecanim. The blending of animations and how easy it is to control the blendtrees through code makes movement mechanics a lot easier.
Yeah mecanim has many great qualities but is animation system at heart and the api is too barebones right now. Much of what it does would be possible to code in legacy.
Yeah sorry, not really described what mine can do. Basically it will allow you to create characters via plug and play and easily manage physics, movement, animation, particles, sounds, layers, sublayers, states and transitions plus so so much more.
I will showcase it real soon. Its not a competitor to mecanim, which i hope to integrate into it, but a tool i think will really make characters such as mario, zelda, assassins creed guy so simple to make, manage and continuosly grow by adding on new states etc.
When you describe it like that, it sounds incredibly useful. If it works with Mecanim, all the better. I can definitely see a tool like this becoming a staple in many people’s development workflows. It would be nice to have a polished system for managing all aspects of a character’s movement and animation.
It’s not uncommon for a AAA game to have one or more full time positions dedicated entirely to implementing the code for the main character. That is to say that it’s months or possibly years of work on top of the common stuff that’s also used elsewhere in the game.
That’s significantly more time than many indie games have for their entire development. As such, indie games just can’t compete, and seem to choose not to. In my game, the main character has had all of probably a day and a half spent on his movement and animation code.
Aside from that, I think that a lot of indie developers don’t really care for putting their limited resources into that kind of polish, in the context that their resources are generally quite limited and they’d prefer to put them into things unique to their game, rather than on things that are just visual bling that still won’t stack up to AAA games.
If your system enables people to do it with less of their own time/resources I’d see it as being a pretty significant benefit to people who have relevant content available.
That is what the plan is. I still have alot of work to do ie tutorials, videos, concepts etc. It will also make dealing with collisions very easy and building states you can swap around and build a data base of with ease. A layer, sublayer or state can contain anything so that along with the custom callbacks etc making characters will be very easy.
Those were my thoughts too hence the reason im creating my stuff.
I want devs, indies especially, to have a much easier way of doing this. There are some great 2d characters done by indies but when it comes to 3d, especially anything similar to a 3rd person character, the quality can drop. It does take a lot of effort planning, design and coding the mechanics etc tweaking, testing and so on. Then its practically hardcoded and major changes require a lot of effort.
In my system you could create a character base easily with an idle, movement blend tree ie wk-run etc, a fall and a jump. Then decide you want the character to do different jumps based on speed, simply make a new jump state, plug it in and add a new transition to i from the movement state. You decide you want a quick stop if running to fast, again create a new state(that can contain anything ie animations), create the transition and link it. Then you need a land, new state, link it to the fall, maybe have multiple lands, based on the distance fallen or surface landed on. Easily added. Maybe you realise you have alot of ground based states leading to fall. Add a ground sublayer, link all ground states into it and link the sublayer to the fall with a transition…basic outline.
Theres a whole lot more to it so i dont really want to be posting here when its kinda off topic.
The issue I see there isn’t the code, though. I could easily enough put together my own state system to do all of that (though if your tool let me do it in hours instead of days, awesome) but the issue is that I wouldn’t be able to get content. Your system seems to address flexibility on the functionality side, but it doesn’t address the fact that in your use case I now need to get, create or modify more animations as I go - and since I can’t do that I still won’t be designing games that require advanced character animation in the first place.
As long as it’s got the appropriate level of ease of use, I think it might actually be a more useful system to animators/designers than to coders. You seem to solve most or all of the issues that a non-coder character animator may have in getting their animated character responding to input in a level, and if that’s the case it’s fantastic.
Content is always going to be an issue be it textures, sounds or animations but the asset store has fantastic assets available. I do plan on including my own animation assets with it and continuosly adding to the library of it with state behaviours and animations etc.
I hope you couldnt build a state system like the one im working on in a few days. It has taken me quite a while lol
It is actually a coders tool at heart with non-coders and artists being able to reuse the custom behaviours very easily in a custom character graph.
In “days” I probably couldn’t make one as advanced as yours might be, but I most likely could make one that suits whatever the specific needs of my project are. (Mind you I have many years of experience under my belt where many others here are just starting out. I am probably not of your core audience.)
Yes, content is almost always going to be an issue for small teams. I guess what I’m getting at is that I’d hate for you to heavily invest in solving a problem just to run into a different bottleneck. That might not be the case, as between your work and Mechanim and the Asset Store maybe it’s mostly covered. All I’m saying is that personally, right now, code is not the thing that stops me having better animation/locomotion systems in my games.
That is the main the thing, i want non-coders, artists and beginner coders to use it but to really take advantage would require inter/adv coding skills where you build on it and write your own custom behaviours using the custom callbacks ie OnEnter/OnEnterToLoop/OnEnterFromAuto, OnTransition/OnLoopState, OnExitToTransition/OnExitFromAuto/OnExitToLoop/OnExit plus a heap more.
Still, your totally right, good coders can code mosr things and now with the current state of assets most can be bought etc.
I did also plug mecanim into my system too to test and it work pretty well, allowing to control mecanims transitions, blend trees etc