Animations and states

[YouGroove]

When i look at Goblin script, i can see lot of lines of code to manage states and animations.

This is where i would see some "hight level" graphic flowgraph like tool to simply connect states and animations with some variables for speed etc ...

 

Some other engines have that sort of flowGraph, this way you can test your animations and states without coding. This just speeds up workflow for games using characters and for non programmers.

 

Like :

No input message ->Idle State -> Play idle (variable speed anim = 5)

Walk input message -> State beginWalk -> Blend wal (variable % blend, speed, duration)

Walk input message && End beginWalk -> State = walk (speed =5)

 

etc ...

 

I won't post concurrents editors, but it's some idea for lot more later as they are lot more needed features (terrain, water etc ...)

[Josh]

Our animation system is as simple as it could possibly be. You can just tell the animation manager script what the current sequence should be, and it will automatically blend all the active animation sequences, and drop them from the stack once they fade out. Nothing is easier than that.

[Rick]

I think it's more about how one triggers the animations. The animation script is one part of this.

 

@YouGroove, I'll explore if there are ways to get this going with the flowgraph because I agree it would be cool if we could hook this up with the flowgraph.

 

One obstacle we need to get over is not being able to define arrays in scripts that get exposed to the properties as that would help with letting the user define states.

[YouGroove]

In fact , like Josh said , the scritp is easy enought, we can do without that sort of tool Rick

This is just i seen that on some 3D engines, and i think having some coll feature like that integrated to LE3 could be good for LE3 in the 3D artist side.

Well new features for the editor in the style of 3DSMAX is just great, perhaps it's better to wait for that to grow.

This will be the way for us to create extensions.

[Rick]

It's not about the animation manager script (because that script is easy), it's about managing states that call this script. That's the part that can get complicated in code, so I disagree. I think having an easy flowgraph way to manage states that are attached to animations would be a great feature.