Domarius

That's frigging awesome, I can't wait till we FINALLY see some games that actually use this!!

Ahh... after looking at this in depth I think what we need to do is re-parent the pad joint to the shoulder joint. This gives the best movement. I think in the vid, squill, you parented it to the upper arm joint. If it's parented to the shoulder, then it doesn't move when the arm moves, just when the shoulder bone is manually rotated, which is what we want. I tried it out temporarily on the source mesh for the proguard - it was easy enough, and looked great, but I don't know how this would impact all the animation work that's been done so far... (And I just noticed we have 2 breast bones - never spotted this before, because they're just called joint9 and joint8. But this is great! Well not just for womens breasts, but we can make our characters breath now...)

I'd say weight them to a joint that's a child of the upper arm, so it moves with it by default, and then we can tweak that joint seperately in special cases where the clipping occours.

That's really cool, kind of has a radiosity shadows effect.

Okay they're all in, the tdm_ai_guard_proguard.def file is updated with the combat info for each anim... however when I try to test it in game with testModel tdm_ai_guard_proguard, I get "Can't load tdm_ai_guard_proguard.ase" I committed my changes anyway... I vaguely remember this error, I think it's something simple...

Well if you look at my overhead swing, he moves is arm right back without any wierdness, a yawn stretch shouldn't be much further than that.

There are a couple of source files I've uploaded that haven't made it into the game yet. Tonight is my next darkmod night, I'll sort it all out then, I think I can finish all the combat anims tonight.

I'm at work so I can't check, but this has something to do with using the wrong rig. An older version of our new rig has 67, the latest one has 71.

It's a fair call spring, the proguard is very thin, too bad we didn't realise earlier. There's no getting around the fact that "fat" characters will need seperate animations though.

The elbow doesn't bend like that on the version I rigged. Check proguardmesh_export.mb under proguad_mb from from the model_src repository, that is the one the game uses, so if the source mb files for the animations don't look exactly like that, that's okay because proguardmesh_export.mb is the mesh and bone set that the game uses, the other mb animation files it only uses the bone rotations from. (Also all the new animations in the proguard_mb folder use the .ma extension, so if you're looking at a .mb file, it's most likely out of date) I would double check and do you a screenshot right now, but I can't from work (on my lunch break). The shoulder is a different issue - you can't just rotate the arm upwards and expect the shoulder to look fine - you actually need to complete the rotation by rotating the shoulder control, it's the floating shape that looks like a shoulder pad above each shoulder. Like you said, the other sword swinging animations do this, so you can check them out for an example of how to do it properly. Check out model_src\proguard_mb\combat_sword_attack_overhead.mb

You don't need the expansion but you need the latest patch for doom (1.3.1 I think) Not sure about the german version, I have no idea.

Moving the belt without the rest of the hip area is impossible, we have no bones for that. If I were doing this I might hide the fact that the belt can't move by having minimal movement in the hands once they hold it, and have him focus his movement on shifting his hips around, maybe twisting left to right a bit.

Hahahah... that has a rhythm to it...

Is it normal fighting stance for the back foot to be pointed out so sideways? It's fine, it's just that when I want to drive something downwards forcefully, I naturally want to spin my foot as the heel comes up so that the toes point forward, so that I have more stability throwing the downward force, then resetting it back the way you had it during the recovery phase. I'm a little bit experienced with fighting and keeping balance after going to Jujitsu for a few years, so I don't have zero clue, but if someone with actual sword fighting experience wants to weigh in, I'm interested. I don't mind the anim being like this though, but in case anyone notices - that's why he's doing it. I uploaded the overhead swing attack with the new pose. Ran out of time to do anything else, but I think I'll wait till I've done them all till I export them all to the game anyway.

Thanks! I filled in the gaps and made a more concise set of steps for everyone else. Delete any anim clips in Window, General, Visor, Character Clips, and also Character Poses In Visor, go to Unused Poses, RMB, File, Import Choose the file (Combat_pose.ma) Activate character set (bottom right of main window) Open Window, Animation, Trax If only see green "Sound" track heading, have to click the icon with a red stick figure and a + drag(MMB) the combat pose from the visor to the "citywatch" heading in the trax editor (doesn't matter where) delete the pose from the trax editor, and also the "Unused poses" tab in the visor now the pose is added to the "Character poses" tab in the visor Deactivate the character set. Go to frame 0 Go to the Character Poses tab in the visor, RMB click -> apply pose. This adds the pose and you can key any part of the whole pose. If you play the anim without setting keys, it snaps back to normal, so it's like you just moved the body parts there yourself.

Yep

Yeah that zombie at bluesnews.com definetly looks like an animated dead body that shouldn't be moving. As opposed to a healthy male model mesh dressed up to look "dead".

Just checking - you know that the hand control has a property called "grab" which you should be using if all you want to do is open and close the hand between a clenched fist and flat palmed - this covers the majority of situations. Click on the floating thing that looks like a mitten and on the right you should see a property called "Grab". I use 9 for holding the sword. The feet have properties like this too, called Raise toe, and raise heel.

The way that works for me is I select the bone that will be the "parent" first, then select the object that will be the "child" with shift+click, then press p. Press SHIFT+P to unparent a child. You want to parent that sword to the hip bone, since that's where the belt is weighted to. Any hip movement will move the belt and the sword in the same way, which is what you want.

I support not putting key frames on exact frame numbers but only when absolutely nessecary. Sometimes when you time scale, snapping them to frame numbers can mess it up. Also I did a "shake fist furiously at the thief" anim and there is no way I could have gotten his fist to vibrate fast enough if I couldn't place keyframes in spaces shorter than a frame. But for all the nice smooth swinging combat motions I have kept them on the frames. I think MOST of the time you can.

If you read the brief history you can see what they were doing for all that time - pretty much all the things that can go wrong. Some of the bigger reasons were starting with a game engine that was not very stable and buggy when they got it (some version of the Unreal engine) and then they took so long that they changed engines about 3 times and that takes ages in itself.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58562 Man, I want to play it after seeing that trailer Looks like after all these years they were finally going to do it right

I updated the idle anim with the hands a bit further out (love the graph editor - just dragged the X rotation key frames for the shoulder upwards all together, no manual posing necessary) Proguard still looks okay with them out a bit, so I tested it on the 2 AI that I could find that use the proguard anims. Looks wierd on the nobleman - his arms look too far out, not sure why they are further out than the proguard itself. And the thug... well he's just fat. Fat people really need their own animations, they move very differently. So till then we'll have to live with a bit of clipping on him.

I can't open them They are 8.5 and I'm running 7.0.1

A guy at work said when he took his xbox 360 out of the box and fired it up, it instantly red-ringed. So he hit it and turned it on again. It's worked ever since, so far...