Domarius

Oh the other thing is - how far away must the table be from the chair, to allow the AI to actually navigate between the chair and the table to sit down? Since they won't pull in the chair like we do in real life, I'll have to animate these animations knowing how far away the table must be.

Yeah I noticed the slim difference in the bench marks. As for the 9800 GX2, I'm apprehensive... I make it a rule never to buy bleeding edge components, best waiting around till they become mainstream and we know there's no problems with them.

There isn't a need for an extra feature like this. Warming hands by a fire would just use our existing planned stim system, where if they are near enough to something, they receive the stim, and in the case of a painting, have a random chance to turn and do the "admire" anim, or in the case of a fire, have a random chance of turning and doing the "warm hands" anim. If you want these anims to be triggerd, you'd set your patrol paths to pass close enough to these objects to enter the stim radius.

Ah of course - we need a standard height for tables AND chairs. Well at the moment I can't see why all sittable objects shouldn't be the same height. So what do we reckon - 40 for tables and 24 for chairs? If so, one of the modellers should make a default table and chair, that are exactly those heights, and I can import them into Motion Builder and use them as a guide.

Well I could be wrong, but I imagined triggering events on the acquisition of any object would be a commonly used feature. Like Indiana Jones taking the statue that causes the room to cave in.

Certainly. This would also apply for the "take" animation, which reaches out in front - to take something off a table, or to mime giving something to someone else. Hopefully we can come up with one soon, so I can work on the idle sit anims for the milestone. It should be pretty easy - just choose the most generic table from our library and declare it as the standard Round it up to the nearest 8 if nessecary, like Komag suggested. I imagine "table surfaces" such as benches, sinks, etc. might be made of brushes from time to time.

Is there a standard height for tables yet? Having one will let us do idle animations such as; lean elbows on table, reading a book, writing in a journal, picking finger food from a plate, etc.

Oh ok - as I said in the other thread - whew

Oh ok - whew For a sec I thought it wasn't even going to be used in the next milestone.

Should these 2 features be added to a todo list?

It would be good to know what each of the anims in this list are for - eg. the attack and parry are needed for Ish to work on combat, etc. If I had have known the warm hands one was only meant as an idle, I would have raised the issue that you need a fire stim, and done a different anim instead - one where he just rubs his hands together and blows on them.

Well this is a surprise I thought the whole reason it was in the list for the next milestone was because it was now possible for AI to react to fire nearby (in the same way we planned to have AI randomly stop and admire a painting) and was waiting for an animation to be done for it - that's why I didn't name it "idle_" in the first place...

Ah ok that sounds pretty good.

Spring, I updated the vid - he's leaning about half as much, the hands are angled up a bit, and I tried animating the fingers. I think the fingers are better than before but not nearly as good as I'd like. Unfortunately they are extremely difficult to control - there are 3 bones - thumb, pointer finger, and mitten fingers, and moving any one of them might randomly affect the others, over several keyframes - it's as if some of the finger verticies share weighting between more than one bone or something. This is as good as I could get it.

Well this is the animation forum, I think you want the coding forum. AI heads already dynamically look around during the game, and can turn to look at you if they hear something.

Good, I hope I don't have to use a floppy drive, I was thinking about that,. I have an XP SP2 installation CD. A bullfrog hey? Noise is probably the one thing I put above performance at the moment, if it can be helped. Is it constantly loud?

Oh right - glad we cleared that up early then

What if you want to animate in Motion Builder, can you export the mb to fbx or something?

Thanks, I'll try those. I liked the pop, I thought it made it look less stiff but if it's not selling it then I'll get rid of it. Well that's an idle animation, I've already got reference footage for that too, but this one is for the milestone, to react to fireplace stims. Hopefully angling the hands up will help with that. I personally think the leaning helps it be more generic to low and high things actually, cause with high things they could be leaning towards it, whereas if he's standing up straight, there's no explanation for why he's not bending down to low things. Let's see it in action.

Re: "cut in half" - So you mean you want him to stop after he holds his hands up? Angling the hands, no problems. I'll try animating the fingers during the rub too.

I've added the warming hands one to the game.

Yeah I thought about that too - I just figured record one drunk male "character" and one female one too. It means you can have a drunk person with the full bark varieties, but all drunk people will have the same male (or female) voice. But your solution might be good too.

Yeah I figured it could look like he's leaning towards it... well what does everyone else think? It would be trivial for me to change it to standing up and angling the hands forwards if I have to. Thanks to Motion Builder I can do it on a new layer without changing the existing key frames.

You know how it is NH - no one person knows every other aspect of the mod - you just have to remind people of stuff now and again that's all it takes. Well there doesn't appear to be any male & female drunk entries in the doc - don't know if you want to add them or not, but I know having drunk guards was one of the high points of the thief experience. Maybe you consider it to be left up to the fans to create.

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkmod/movies/Do...s/WarmHands.avi I uploaded this one, it's in the game, ready for you programmers to do your thing. BTW Thanks squill for the tip about the cut down def file trick, that helped speed things up a bit.