animations NPCs swaying from side to side while turning - procedural animation

[Arcturus]

Horse has a different orientation of joints. It has x axis forward but NPCs in Darkmod have y forward. Different software have different conventions.

I re-exported the mesh, af.md5anim and walk_01.md5anim with y forward and x up orientations on head bone:

Vision cone is tied to it.

So I wonder if there's a way to correct cone's rotation independently from the head bone. Herbivores have close to 360 field of view, btw. Realistically there probably should be two cones.

Anyway, that doesn't change the erroneous behavior at 300 FPS.

In 2018 I also changed "tun_rate" from 150 to 41. Looks good for walking horse, and matches the turning animations, but it's too slow for running one. So when galloping, horses bump into walls and lose track of path nodes. Changing it back to 150 will fix that, but that's unrelated to super high frame rate bug.

[stgatilov]

I fixed the bug, hopefully without breaking other AI logic.
The horse goes along its path fine even with 1000 FPS.

[stgatilov]

I suppose AI sets FOV from these spawnargs:

• "fov" --- default 150
• "fov_vert" --- default -1, meaning "same as normal fov"

The first one is called "horizontal", the second is called "vertical".

Apparently, we consider the coordinate system of the head joint.
It looks like X is "forward" and Y is "up", but this of course can be more convoluted.

FOV area is built around "forward" direction as follows:

1. we can deviate from the horizontal plane by up to "vertical fov / 2"
2. we can deviate to left/right (in projection onto the horizontal plane) by up to "horizontal fov / 2".

It is possible to customize this "fov coordinate system", i.e. make it different from the head joint system.
This is done using the following spawnargs:

• "fov_rotation" --- rotation as 3 Euler angles
• "ko_spot_offset" --- this provides offset from head joint origin (judging from the name, it also affects blackjack mechanics)

So you can probably tweak fov_rotation to fix orientation, then set something like "fov" = 300 and "fov_vert" = 120.
If I understood correctly the math of FOV area, it should give almost all-around vision, except for blind spots at the back, up and down.

Perhaps I should improve debug visualization, so that it render the actual FOV instead of some virtual cones.

[nbohr1more]

15 hours ago, stgatilov said:

I fixed the bug, hopefully without breaking other AI logic.
The horse goes along its path fine even with 1000 FPS.

I think you fixed more than this bug. The AI no longer seem to walk through each other and produce weird clusters of overlapping attackers in "The Golden Skull". This has been a problem since 2.04 ( pre-uncapped FPS ).

[stgatilov]

17 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

I think you fixed more than this bug. The AI no longer seem to walk through each other and produce weird clusters of overlapping attackers in "The Golden Skull". This has been a problem since 2.04 ( pre-uncapped FPS ).

Is there an issue about it in the tracker?
I believe my changes should not affect behavior with ~60 FPS.

I won't be surprised if there are other bugs like this still remaining in the AI code...

[nbohr1more]

Will keep looking but here are the 2 closest related trackers:

https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=2688

https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4326

I'll check out Awaiting the Storm but I am not expecting any big improvements there.

I normally use Golden Skull as a test mission anytime any path related changes are made in Dev since 2.03 search type looks good and 2.04 ( modern ) search type shows these AI anomalies.

[Arcturus]

18 hours ago, stgatilov said:

I fixed the bug, hopefully without breaking other AI logic.
The horse goes along its path fine even with 1000 FPS.

The horse pathfinding bug is indeed fixed. But the bug where walk cycle animations reset at every turn remains:

On 4/12/2026 at 5:25 PM, Arcturus said:

With vertical sync off, uncap FPS on and high max FPS values (around 100 and above), the character animations get restarted (walking, running) when AI makes a turn. It looks bad and causes NPCs to stop a lot, too:

I uploaded map/turn.map to repository.

Apart from twitching, you can see that at 300 FPS they also stop more often and play idle animations.

[stgatilov]

Meanwhile, I have improved FOV visualization in svn rev 11285.
Now you can set "tdm_ai_showfov 2" and get close, then you'll see the whole visible area.
Also there is FOV coordinate system, with the typical RGB axes convention.

It is hard to capture it properly on a screenshot:

[stgatilov]

As for weird fast movements, I'm pretty sure it is because the AI animation script uses wait(16 ms) instead of a proper waitFrame.

I'll need to understand how exactly waitFrame works now (it also has 16 ms inside, but I'm not yet sure what is "manual control"). Then I'll have to adjust the animation loops, and probably it will fix the issue.

[Arcturus]

Here's a version of the "banking" script in a separate file.

These go into the tdm_ai_base.script:

Spoiler

    // member variables
    float    m_bankingLastYaw;
    float    m_bankingCurrentValue;
    float    m_bankingJointOrigin;
    float    m_bankingJointSpine;
    float    m_bankingJointNeck;
    float    m_bankingArmL;
    float    m_bankingArmR;
    float    m_bankingJointHandle;
    float    m_bankingJointHandle1;
    float    m_bankingJointHandle2;
    float    m_bankingIntensity;
    boolean    m_bankingActive;

    // Function Prototypes
    void    initBanking();
    void    updateBankingLoop();
    void    applyProceduralBanking(float val);

    // --- Procedural Banking State ---
    float    m_bankingLastYaw;
    float    m_bankingCurrentValue;
    boolean    m_bankingActive;

Spoiler

void ai_darkmod_base::init() 
{

    initBanking();

}

In the tdm_main.script:

Spoiler

#include "script/tdm_ai_banking_humanoid.script"

In the tdm_ai_humanoid.def

Spoiler

    "can_bank"                    "1"    //    Will tilt on turning
    "banking_intensity"       "1"

This way it will only apply to humanoids, and mappers will be able to disable it or change strength for individual NPCs by overwriting those values in Darkradiant.

The rest goes to tdm_ai_banking_humanoid.script

tdm_main.script tdm_ai_humanoid.def

tdm_ai_base.script

tdm_ai_banking_humanoid.script

[Arcturus]

On 4/19/2026 at 6:11 PM, stgatilov said:

As for weird fast movements, I'm pretty sure it is because the AI animation script uses wait(16 ms) instead of a proper waitFrame.

I'll need to understand how exactly waitFrame works now (it also has 16 ms inside, but I'm not yet sure what is "manual control"). Then I'll have to adjust the animation loops, and probably it will fix the issue.

At higher FPS, random movements (e.g. head rotation) are also too fast:

 

[Bikerdude]

On 5/2/2026 at 11:17 PM, Arcturus said:

At higher FPS, random movements (e.g. head rotation) are also too fast:

I think the head movement anim's have always been too fast at any FPS...

[Arcturus]

On 5/4/2026 at 12:28 PM, Bikerdude said:

I think the head movement anim's have always been too fast at any FPS...

The "ease out" part of the animation feels a little unnatural to me.

[Bikerdude]

1 hour ago, Arcturus said:

The "ease out" part of the animation feels a little unnatural to me.

Your the animator, so I defer to you in this matter

[Arcturus]

On 4/18/2026 at 11:00 PM, stgatilov said:

"fov_rotation" --- rotation as 3 Euler angles

I rotated horse fov by -90 so they now look forward. Also increased the overall fov.

[stgatilov]

Yes, now it looks more like what a horse should see 

As a matter of fact, I have fixed the issue with animation stutter/jump in the latest SVN.

[Arcturus]

56 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

As a matter of fact, I have fixed the issue with animation stutter/jump in the latest SVN.

You mean this issue?

I still see animation restarting at each loop and idle anims playing too often... I uploaded test/turn.map to the repository.

[Arcturus]

I forgot I already uploaded that map to main 'maps' folder before...

[stgatilov]

44 minutes ago, Arcturus said:

You mean this issue?

Yes.

Quote

I still see animation restarting at each loop and idle anims playing too often... I uploaded test/turn.map to the repository.

Do you use executable from assets SVN or an executable built locally from source code?
I usually don't commit newly built executables between dev builds.

Quote

I forgot I already uploaded that map to main 'maps' folder before...

I'd say test maps look better inside "test" subdirectory, maybe delete the first one.

[Arcturus]

Ok, I'll wait for the exe then.

13 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

I'd say test maps look better inside "test" subdirectory, maybe delete the first one.

Done.

[Arcturus]

I changed "can_bank" to "canBank" since that's the more common format in Darkmod.

[Arcturus]

So I had a conversation with Gemini and it told me that in order to get rid of the code from tdm_ai_base.script I can use "scriptobject" inside tdm_ai_humanoid.def. The problem is there can only be one script object, so if I want both banking script and head tracking script, then one will have to inherit from another. So banking now inherits from head_tracking. That seems like a hack. But it prevents this crash:

But now that I think of it, people probably already use "scriptobject" for other things. So it will cause conflicts.