Animation

As I wrote in my CoreAnimation post, the Nebula2 animation system was in dire need of a new design and a clean rewrite. During Drakensang’s development and another research project which focused on facial animation, we had to add new features on a system which wasn’t designed for those capabilities. The resulting system worked, but just barely, and from a design standpoint it became quite an un-maintainable mess. When working within the constraints of a commercial project (defined by milestone dates, features and quality), this is often the only choice, it’s usually better to have something working at the end of the day (even though it’s a bit ugly internally), then to slip milestones. At least it was clear, what features would be important for a clean redesign, and how they shouldn’t be implemented.

With Nebula3 as an experimentation test-bed I started to work on a new animation system even before Drakensang was finished. Some of the main problems of the old system were:

• animation low-level and high-level features where implemented all over the place, some in Nebula2, some in Mangalore, some in the application
• sampling at random points in time wasn’t properly supported (the cross blending code required that the sampling time was modified at positive increments)
• there was no priority blending, and blend weights had been normalized to add up to 1, this gave “funny results” unless the application provided “carefully tuned” blend weights
• blending of partial animation (where only a part of a character skeleton is animated) wasn’t properly supported at first, and sort-of hacked in later
• it wasn’t possible to blend 2 identical animations at different sampling times
• animation clips could not be started in the future or past
• … and a lot of small bugs and quirks which resulted from the growing complexity of the animation system

The first design choice was to split the animation code into 2 subsystems: CoreAnimation and Animation. CoreAnimation has already been described here.

While CoreAnimation mainly cares about resource management, the higher-level Animation system provides features to implement complex animation blending scenarios.

When starting the Animation subsystem I was considering blend trees. The leaves of a blend tree would be sampling nodes, which sample a single animation clip at a specific time, and the nodes of the tree would accept sampled data at the input connectors, mix (or otherwise process) the incoming data into a single output connector, until, at the root node of the tree, the final result would be available. After a few weeks of work and several interface revisions it became clear that working with such a system would be much more complicated then even with the old Nebula2 animation system. When feeding the blend tree system with “real world scenarios” I never ended up with a satisfactory simplicity, instead even relatively simple blending scenarios looked incredibly complex.

Thus I scrapped blend trees, and started anew with a more straight-forward priority-blending system based on animation tracks (roughly like Maya’s Trax Editor works). With this new approach, everything suddenly fell into place, and after just a few days, a first implementation was finished.

The new Animation system has 2 important object types: AnimJob and AnimSequencer.

An AnimJob represents a single animation with the following attributes:

• Start Time: The start time of an AnimJob, can be in the past or in the future.
• Duration: The duration of the AnimJob, doesn’t have to correlate with an animation clip’s length, it can also be infinite. 
• Blend Priority: The AnimSequencer class implements priority-blending, where higher priority clips dominate lower priority clips. Thus a high priority clip with a blend weight of 1.0 will completely obscure any previous lower priority clips.
• Blend Weight: The final weight used for priority blending inbetween the fade-in and fade-out period.
• Fade-In / Fade-Out Time: the time used to smoothly blend the clip with the current previous result.

With the Start Time, Duration and Blend Priority attributes, AnimJobs can be arranged by an AnimSequencer object in a 2D coordinate system where the horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is blend priority. When sampling at a given point in time, the AnimSequencer first finds all animation jobs which cross the sampling position. Then, starting with the lowest priority animation job, each active job is evaluated and the resulting animation samples are priority-blended with the previous blending result.

AnimJob is just a base class which can be subclassed to hook custom functionality into the blending process (like inverse kinematics, or some lookat-target functionality). At the moment there is only one specific subclass: PlayClipJob, which simply samples an animation clip.

The new Animation subsystem fixes pretty much all problems of the old Nebula2 system:

• automatic blend-weight normalization has been replaced with priority-blending which is much more useful in typical blending scenarios
• it’s now possible to correctly evaluate animations at random points in time, with correct cross-fading
• correct blending of partial animations (where an animation only manipulates parts of a character skeleton) is now a standard feature
• animation clips can now be blended with themselves
• animation jobs can be started in the future or in the past

Overall, the new Animation system is much simpler, robust, easier to use and easier to understand.

A few things are still missing which proved useful in the past, or which we identified as a nice-to-have-feature:

• Some sort of name-mapping for animation clips:
• In Drakensang, every character had about 400..600 animations, most of those were combat animation variations (different attack types, different weapons, with or without shield, etc…), but the animations actually fell into only a few categories (like attack, idle, walk, …).
• It would be nice if a mapping mechanism would exist, where the application sets a few variables (like type of weapon in hand, shield in hand, etc…), and then maps an abstract animation name like “attack” to a specific name like “male_twohandedsword_attack1” by resolving a few user-defined mapping rules.
• Some sort of finite-state-machine to define how animations relate to each other.
• This is mainly useful to automatically play transition animations. For instance, if a character currently has no weapon equipped, but he needs to play an attack animation, the state machine would decide that a “draw sword” animation needs to be played first.

Vista

Today I'm finally doing the transition to Vista. After my first and failed attempt in April 2007 I've now got a new work desktop with 32-bit Vista installed: a Dell XPS with Core2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA 9800 GT and a 700 GB hard disc. It's huge and f*ck-ugly (a true PC indeed), and it glows blue in the dark. Seriously, who's designing those machines nowadays, and for what target audience?

I'm pretty happy with Vista now. Looks like all the problems from 2 years ago have been fixed, disc and network performance seems good, and everything feels "snappier" then on my previous machine (although, given the better hardware specs, it better should!)

Testing Windows Live Writer...

Looks like I found a new editor for my blog posts: Windows Live Writer. It's part of the messenger download package here: http://get.live.com/

Will checkout the email tool on my private notebook soon. Everything seems to work together with Google services. I think Microsoft finally starts to understand how that Internet thing works ;)

Games Of The Year

My personal GOTY's for 2008:

• Fallout 3: I was very skeptical at first, but after 1.5 playthroughs (and counting) I must say that this is the best Bethesda game yet. In my opinion, the Fallout world fits the "Bethesda school of game design" much better then the phantasy world of the Elder Scrolls. And gameplay-wise, Fallout is quite a bit more streamlined then Oblivion, keeping the player engaged without giving up too much freedom.
  
• Ninja Gaiden 2: Yeah, the game was rushed and there are some obvious flaws, but the combat in NG2 is simply spectacular. I must have played through the game eight or nine times, and I'm currently in the middle of my first Mentor run. I wish there would be hope for some sort of refined "NG2 Black", but with Itagaki's leave from Tecmo chances seem to be void :(
  
• Dead Space: This game came out of nowhere for me, and in fact, it's hard to describe, why the game is so great. Dead Space is basically "Doom3, done right", and that's all there needs to be said. It's an old-school corridor shooter with shiny graphics and rock-solid shooting mechanics. And I can't get over the fact that this is an EA game. EA!!!

Live Arcade GOTYs: Castle Crashers, RezHD, BC: Rearmed and Omega Five (hmm, more great games on XBLA then retail this year...).

Here's my XBLA wishlist for 2009: downloadable full games, and more price variety for downloadable games (in my opinion, a game like Mirror's Edge would be better if it wouldn't have to fill the shoes of a full-blown 60.- Euro game).

See ya'all in 2009 :)

Home (PSN)

I was just checking out Home, and to put it mildly, I was not impressed:

• I was trying for about 15 minutes to get past the start screen, getting all types of connection errors, then suddenly... one connection attempt worked, as a "casual user" I would have given up after the first four or five errors (which do have intuitive names like "C931").
  
• I tried for 10 minutes to create a character which doesn't look like shit and failed.
  
• Downloads and long loading times between sections totally kills the "experience".
• Everything basically looks and feels like it has been designed by yuppie marketeers stuck in the 90's.
  

I doubt I will ever return. Even if Home was "the cool shit", the long startup time kills every impulse to even launch that thing.

I don't know... I refuse to believe that Sony is driven by marketing peeps who thought that Second-Life is the next-big-thing during its short media-hype. I just don't "get" it. But who knows, I wasn't "getting" the Wii either, and look how that turned out (yeah, who am I kidding, it's more likely that Home will turn into a wasteland and Sony will let it die a quiet and slow death in a few months). Hmm... wasteland... time to return to Fallout3 :)

Month of Shooters

I'm currently playing through the Gears 2 single player campaign, and I don't know why exactly, but I'm not having very much fun. There are a few easy to identify points which I clearly don't like:

• Vehicle sequences: I don't know why FPS designers still torture us with vehicle sequences. The mini-tank in Gears 2 controls like shit (a bit like the Mass Effect Mako, but worse), and there's too much driving through boring tunnels with nothing else happening.
  
• Stupid story: So far I'm not seeing the better story that was promised. Instead I'm just seeing Dom bringing up his wife all the time (just found her yesterday). What is this emotional bullshit doing in my Gears... really. If you want to do an emotional story, do it right. The Gears main character are simply not built for stuff like this. It's like asking Schwarzenegger to play Shakespeare. Some things simply don't work, no matter how hard one tries.
  
• Dialog: alright, Marcus isn't exactly a second Cicero when it comes to conversational skills, but those stupid one-liners get old pretty fast.
• Too much brown: I know it's cliche, but Gears could just as well be played on an old black-and-white monitor and not a lot of information would be lost. I'm sick of monochromatic shooters.
  

Except from the vehicle sequences (which are inexcusable) I can live with the other points. I like my bad story and cheesy dialogs, if there's a good game at the core.

But somehow, the core gameplay isn't very satisfying to me in Gears2. I've been playing into the COD4 single-player-campaign again for comparison, and holy shit this an entirely different level, even the "quiet moments" in COD4 are packed with action.

Gears2 brings up unbelievable stuff like mile-long worms, giant fish and whole cities sinking into the ground, but it doesn't grab me. Maybe it is because the scale is too big, or maybe it is because the actual fire fights aren't very exciting. I think maybe the main reason why the game leaves me cold is that there are too long pauses between fire fights, and fights are too predictable. Coming into an area with a lot of conveniently placed barricades? Sure as hell a few seconds later a door will shut behind you and Locust will start attacking.

Good thing Dead Space came along, otherwise I might have lost my faith in shooters ;)

I'm very impressed with the new Xbox dashboard, especially with the fast and painless update process (took maybe 2 minutes through my 16Mbit DSL line at home). I was prepared for the worst (something like 2 weeks without Xbox Live like last Christmas), but apart from a few glitches on the Marketplace which were fixed the next day everything went perfect. I love how responsive, fast and colorful everything is now, and the hard drive installation is a god-send because it turns off the jet-engine noise from the DVD drive.

I even like the Avatar stuff more then I should. I've been trying to create a Ron Jeremy avatar, but that's where the avatar creator really comes to its limits. Here's my wishlist for the next update:

• the current fat setting needs to be a lot fatter, the current maximum isn't even enough to build a realistic Elvis in his later years
• more 70's porn star accessories and clothing please
• more real hair styles(!), there's plenty of 90's neo-hippie shit, but no hair which nearly does Ron Jeremy justice
• hair styles should include chest and armpit options

Since I didn't find the right hair and clothes, I went for a Ron Jeremy/Princess Leia hybrid:

CoreGamer

It feels like this is the most packed holiday season of all time. It is a shame that publishers don't spread their releases a bit more over the year. There was hardly a single good game coming out every quarter for the 360, and now suddenly since end of October it feels like there's a block buster released every day. Unfortunately, a lot of great games will be buried under the heavy weights like Gears or Fallout3, but well who am I to complain. It's a great time for hardcore gamers across all platforms, and that's all that counts :)

I think I'll have to work on the oncoming backlog until at least February next year, and careful scheduling is necessary to manage the avalanche of games indeed. Fortunately some of the games didn't turn out quite as good as pre-release-hype made me belief, so I can push a few games into next year. One of those is FarCry2. It's not a bad game by any means, I was prepared for the open-world-ness (which is the exact opposite of the original FarCry) and shitty to non-existent story (which is exactly in line with the original FarCry). But still I was disappointed. I must confess that I didn't give the game a real chance (only played for one evening, about 2 to 3 hours). Graphics are great, but game-play wise it is somewhere between Just Cause and Mercenaries2, and I already had my share of sandbox games this year I guess. However I will definitely come back to FC2 next year when the storm has settled a bit, but it looks like this will be the Assassin's Creed of 2008 (spectacular presentation, shallow gameplay).

Next up was Fable2. Great game (especially with the downloadable English audio track), but I just haven't the time to appreciate the game as a whole. The game requires a lot of time investment, but rewards the player for the time spent with a great sense of immersion. But at the moment I just don't have the attention span required for a game like this. One thing I found surprising was, that one of my old favorites, Overlord, in places looks better or at least very similar to Fable2 (not a surprise, since the Overlord designers definitely drew a lot of inspiration from the original Fable), but considering that Overlord is a 2007 title, Fable2 should have been a prettier game. I was about half way through Fable2, when along came my personal surprise hit of 2008 (so far at least):

Dead Space!

What a f*cking great game. It's a bit of Alien (the movie), a bit of System Shock, and a bit of Quake2, merged into a wonderfully old-school survival-horror-corridor-shooter. The really surprising bit is: this is an EA game! With the exception of Fight Night 3 and Skate, I wasn't interested in a single EA game for the entire life-time of the 360, and now all of the sudden, EA actually starts to produce great games in a row. This year alone I bought Battlefield BC, Mercenaries2 and Dead Space from EA, and will probably get Mirrors Edge soon. And considering that Bioware is now EA as well... oh dear. What has the world come to, EA making great games... The end must be near indeed hehe.

The PS2 is now at 77 Euro in Germany, just a tad more expensive then a typical 360 or PS3 game. That's the latest model: slim, with integrated power supply, one dualshock, composite cables, looking sexy as hell (no memory card though). Since my last PS2 went MIA, this was a very good reason to impulse-buy a new one. Better investment then my PS3 to be honest. Just playing a few minutes into MGS3 again was worth it.