oDDity

Yes, the charcater makes ALL the difference. I didn't want to comment before for fear of offending, but I can now honestly say it's excellent. THe one nit I would pick is that you should include a second window in the castle to the right of the first - just copy and paste the existing window across, and so it's partially cut off by the edge of the picture and the bush- not an imperitive, but I think it would make it perfect.

TYROT and Atti - our very own Chopin and Liszt

I think we've reached the stage with atti now where there is no need to complement every model, since they're all of an equally high standard....but,ummm - greatwork anyway Is anyone doing the tree beast?

Atti, 3ds Max 7 now has its own normal map plugin as standard...so

I won't give my opinion at this stage, let me see it finished first:) WIPs are hard to criticize since the viewer doesn't know what has or hasn't been finished. That's why I usually don't post any of my models until they're more or less completed

THe Builders have been practicing some new moves :lol:

Or the dial and hands could be a series of 60 (very small - 128x - bitmaps)

Yes, going prone isn't much use indoors in almost all situations, apart from hiding under a bed maybe

T2 used motion capture, T3 did not (as far as I coud tell) That's why the T2 AI seemed more realistic even thougbnthey were made of about 10 polygons. We will be using motion capture for the searches and some of the idle animations, I have stair climbing mo caps, walks, runs etc, they'll have to be tweaked to get them right for our chracters, but havi g the base motion caputre helps a lot. I have already rigged the builder guard, and put some mo cap animations on him, and am currently working out how to get him in the game as a character rather than a static.

I rememebr a few FMs set in broad daylight, it's not as hard as you'd think, though there aren't as many shadows obviously, you have to use the environment for cover instead. On the plus side you can make more noise, since the general hub of activity duing the day covers a lot of sound.

It's not possible to use the doom 'head spiders' they only had 6 legs. Even if they had 8 legs it would still be better to do our own spider anims, and not be constrained by any model template. Spider anims are basically just idle, turn, walk, run, attack, being hit, dying. If only all creatures aims were that simple. We could do the wall and ceiling walking thing from doom though.

Yes, a great example of ambient AI animation was in the Gothic games (my second favourite games ever), which had the most realistic AI I've ever seen (not their intelligence maybe, but they just seemed real because of their animations and dialogue) Still, it's best to get all the base, essential animations out of the way first, though we can keep on bulld a list of optional extras here.

The step rght/left/back animations are for combat, you wouldn't be much of a sword fighter if you could only move forwards. - both the combatant and the non combatant AI can also dodge using them. It would be pretty stupid to have to implement a whole set of animation on the player just for the beneft ofthe odd mirror, but we'll need the player for cutscenes anyway I suppose.

That would be cool, if you hung around till monring and light came flooding in through the windows and lot's of AI showed up going about their daily business. I'd love a mission like that.

I haven't modeled any yet (maybe someone else would like to model them, or do some concept art) I'm thinking of those big bloated albino spiders - like the one that was in the warehouse in T2 on Shipping..recieving. Those things were pretty freaky, we should definitely have them, and the baby ones. IUf no one else fancies it, I'll do them.

Very nice clock Atti) THe clocks and real time did work in T2, there was an easter egg involving the clocks in the bank mission, I think when the clock hit a certain time the bank vault opened or something.

There will need to be several generic lists for different AI types, yes, the zombie needs a walk forward like the human AI, but it will be completely different wheras the other can mostly share the same walk. Same goes for attacks, deaths etc. One for combat AI, one for non-combatants, and then special ones for zombies, burricks etc. None of these groups can use the same animations (well maybe they can share a few, but mostly they'll be unique) These will have to be furthur broken down into sets for male and female. THe city guards, private guards, Builders and haunts can pretty much share the same generic set, most of which I listed above. If we are having female versions of these combat AI (which I don't think we should) that will mean a mostly different set of female animatons. Zombies will need their own unique animation set, as will burricks, treebeasts and any of the other creatures that have appeared in THief over the years. Are we having third person? What sort of body awareness are we having? Will we need to animate the player apart from his arms? THe list that all AI could share would be quite short, just the basic movement anims, pretty much as I listed above minus the draw weapon and weapon attack anims. Walk Forward Step Backward Step Right Step Left RunForward Open Door Idles Deaths Taking hits Surprised Search modes Suspicious

Don't know if this is the correct forum for this, but there doesn't seem to be an animation forum) I suppose for a combatant type we'd need: walk forwad walk backward (or at least step backward) step sideways (one for left and right, can just be mirrored) run forward stop suddnely several different search modes draw various weapons (hammer, sword, bow) weapon attacks weapon blocks several idles being hit by various weapons several deaths (I'm not sure how much the ragdoll handles this) lighting a torch 'what was that?' glancing from side to side opening a door I know the list seems short, but some of those have to be broken down into quite a lot of subcategories. I think those are the basic ones whch all combatant AI will need various combinations of, though I'm sure there will be a lot more to add to the list. Will our AI be jumping, climbing, mantling or swimming?

Don't worry, I'll soon be doing it, not just thinking. I don't think it's going to be much of a problem. THey'll be better than the T3 anims anyway I'm still tweaking and twiddling at the textures. I'm not used to working with normal, specular AND diffuse maps, and tryign to try them in altogether so they compliment each other is not as easy as it sounds (especially not on a charcater) Deep Omega and I will have to have a chat about animations. HE says it's more his area. I am going to be using Maya and Motionbuilder, so we can store the animation in fbx files ad reuse them for other charcaters without much hassle. This requires a particular rig setup for the purpose, and it woul dbe best if we all used the same rig for the humanid charcaters.

I prefered the optional compass, perched on the side like T1&2. I've no idea why nyone would ever need a compass, but even for those that do, they don't need it there constantly, it's only necessary to bring it up if they're lost (yeah like we're going to have levels big enough to get lost in - I wish) I despised everything about the T3 HUD, including the combined compass and lightgem cluttering up the screen.

Dunno, there's a slight chance that they paid professional animators to work on it full time for a few weeks or months. It's no that it's hard, it's just a long arduous process which would bore me shitless, and can never look as good as vertex animation anyway. You have to set a few dozen bones up in the head to animate the jaw and lips and face muscles. You basically animate each of the phonemes (ooh. ahhh, she, etc) You need about a dozen of them, and they'd have to be animated (or at least significantly tweaked) individually for each charcater. I suppose we could set up a few basic ones,. so the mouth at least moves somewhat when speaking.

The barrels are all fine, I'd just suggest lighting the metal parts in the spec map to give them a more metallic look. I thought morrowind could handle plenty of polys Atti, I remember seeing in the construction kit that a charcater in full daedric armour was about 5000 polys. I've never seen a higher poly model than that in any game.

Actually, it is working, I just got a curly bracket wrong

That doesn't work for me BT, the texture just goes black. Where did you find that out, maybe I can go check there for answers.

Cool, I try that BT. I was just thinking about lip syncing - are we going to hve it. It's a complete and total pain in the ass tryng to do it with bone animation, and it always looks like shit. With vertex animation it's no problem at all, but of course, Doom only understands bone deformations.