Fighting animations

[Durad]

Hey all,

I am a diehard Thief fan, and have been watching the progress of this mod. First of all, I just want to say that if I were the people making Thief 4, I would definately hire you guys! I honestly think that with a little professional help to polish it up that you could make the next Thief game - one that would not only be deserving of the first two, but possibly even better. You got that Thiefy atmosphere down sooo well.

That said though, I do have one big complaint. Please do not take this the wrong way, but the fighting animations seem below par. They seem to distract from the atmosphere and make it very difficult to fight. I am also a Mount and Blade fan (I am known there as Vuk). The animations that they had were not perfect, but they were good (as were the Thief one and two animations). Maybe you should consider redoing them in an update.

Please don't take it the wrong way, I think this is the best thing that has happened to the Thief community since Thief II. Keep up the good work!

 

Durad

[Flanders]

It would be really cool if someone with knowledge on motion capture could help on animations. That's probably the best way to make them look realistic.

[SiyahParsomen]

in contrast I liked them. imo, they are above par and far better than mount and blade animations.(don't know how much M&B has improved after version 0.8). But they can be better that's for sure. Btw there is a bug; they don't draw their weapon and just run to player. Happened few times in training mission.

[Diego]

I can make realistic animations. I bet there is a lot of animators willing to contribute with as well. But, like me, they're probably pushed away by technicalities like "you want to contribute animations? good! start by learning how to edit md5 with the notepad, the doom 3 sdk, speak esperanto backwards, etc.." (I'm kidding, but that is fundamentally the problem)

 

Make a max file ready to animate and I bet that in no time you'll be able to choose the ones you like best.

[Flanders]

in contrast I liked them. imo, they are above par and far better than mount and blade animations.(don't know how much M&B has improved after version 0.8). But they can be better that's for sure. Btw there is a bug; they don't draw their weapon and just run to player. Happened few times in training mission.

Never played mount and blade but thief combat looks better. TDM AI not moving their legs at all during combat makes them look stiff.

 

I can make realistic animations. I bet there is a lot of animators willing to contribute with as well. But, like me, they're probably pushed away by technicalities like "you want to contribute animations? good! start by learning how to edit md5 with the notepad, the doom 3 sdk, speak esperanto backwards, etc.." (I'm kidding, but that is fundamentally the problem)

 

Make a max file ready to animate and I bet that in no time you'll be able to choose the ones you like best.

I thought there were problems getting enough animators for this mod during development. Getting animators can't be as easy as you say .

Most all of us use Maya for animating. I'm sure we can provide a mb file of a guard and let people mess with it.

 

Getting the anims in Doom 3 is easy, even I can do that! But you don't even have to know that, others can do that for you. But it's better (and more rewarding for yourself) if you can see them in doom while making anims.

[Noisycricket]

There are some technicalities, like exporting and dealing with the fact that the swing angle and the frame at which the hit is supposed to occur is a factor and maybe the block *i think*. Ishtvan would know and maybe Greebo. Yet the animating itself is pretty straight forward. You simply need our new skeleton, which we have in Maya, motion builder and Blender format, and your good to go. The export process can be a little tricky, but from Greebo's effort, there are many new exporters for many versions of Maya. Some of the export .dll's that Greebo made do not come with a custom registry entry that you *may* need, not sure. It does come with the Maya 8.5 exporter as well as instructions. Arcturus ran into some problems with Blender having to do with stuttering animations when in game, not sure if he overcame those problems or not. He did contribute some animation successfully, such as the belt shifting idle animation, one of my favorites.

[Diego]

I actually thought it was harder than that. What complicates my situation is that I don't use any of these softwares.

[Ishtvan]

It would be nice to know what specific problems you're noticing, rather than just "not as good as X."

[Durad]

It would be nice to know what specific problems you're noticing, rather than just "not as good as X."

 

 

I am sorry, I cannot tell what specific degrees the angles are off by or something, but it looks very stiff and very unnatural. It does not look like a natural way that someone would fight (and yes, I know about fighting).