Giant Spiders

[greebo]

@Springheel: I tested an altered spider localmap, see the comparison here:

 

 

The left one is the current SVN version, the right one is my working copy. Is this worth uploading?

[Springheel]

Sure, I think that probably looks better. Originally I wanted to try and keep a smoother look like real spiders, but I realize they probably wouldn't look that smooth either if you increased their size this much.

[jdude]

I think it looks great, but it would look even better with some hair affects on the legs and mandibles.

[Domarius]

Yeah the bumpier spider is better

[Baddcog]

I guess this is as good a place to post as anywhere.

 

I had an epiphany with the af editor tonight. and I finally understand how it works (somewhat). I was almost completely lost before.

 

Anyway, I remembered the spiders were all twitchy and jumpy when they died. The are no longer like that.

 

For the record, things I changed:

 

1:alot of joints weren't contained by bodies. This can make em really twitchy. I added the knees and ends of legs to the correct leg bodies.

the pincher feelers are now included in the haed body.

 

2:I changed the leg joints from universal to hinge. Now they only rotate foward/backward with a slightly upward bias. Nothing fancy but they are stable.

I think a major problem with the universal joints is that there are 2 legs per body, they are each on a different joint and I think that really messes with Doom.

It would probably be possible to have universal joints and make them more realistic (they aren't bad as is though) if we used 8 bodies, one per leg instead of 4 (2 legs each).

Of course that'll probably defeat the purpose of only 4 which was probably to save resources. Still, 8 bodies wouldn't be bad, but there's no need for 3 bodies per leg.

 

3:I decreased the size of the leg bounding boxes and lowered them a bit. Now when you pull the spider over onto its back it doesn't prop up in the air in an impossible fashion. It can still set a little weird if you pull it just right, but alot of that is flat edges of bounding boxes. The boxes still give a good represention of the upper legs.

 

There is an oddity still, I noticed it before. When the spider dies he doesn't play the death anim and flop onto his back. He didn't do this before either. He might've landed on his back before but that was because the af was unstable.

What he does is continue to twitch, it's like his legs have a twitch anim.

I tested the spider queen (monster_vagary) and its legs continue to twitch after death also. Maybe they inherit from the same base? I couldn't find anything in the spider def that clued me in to this though.

Anyway, if you grab a twitchy leg it stops twitching as you drag it, but will start again when you let go.

This is not an unstable af though. it's not flopping around, its very timely and repetitive, gotta be an anim. I think it's odd though.

 

BTW, the vagary does have a seperate body for each leg, it does use a universal joint for the legs also. We can do this to the spider but it'll take more computations I'm sure.

It would be great if you all could go kill some spiders and give me a little feedback. Good as is? or should we seperate the legs?

[Tels]

What he does is continue to twitch, it's like his legs have a twitch anim.

I tested the spider queen (monster_vagary) and its legs continue to twitch after death also. Maybe they inherit from the same base? I couldn't find anything in the spider def that clued me in to this though.

Anyway, if you grab a twitchy leg it stops twitching as you drag it, but will start again when you let go.

This is not an unstable af though. it's not flopping around, its very timely and repetitive, gotta be an anim. I think it's odd though.

 

I do think this is related to other bodies twitching if dead, for instance the thief and I believe also some guards twitch their hands and head. It is probably a general bug in the (our?) code.

[Baddcog]

No, after I went to sleep last night. Well, after I laid down, before I went to sleep I realized something.

 

The spiders do that, you say the guards do. My lantern bot does it and the vagary (spider queen) does it too.

 

What really clued me in was the fact that my lantern bot does it. I haven't made a death anim for it yet, and I'm not sure our death anims work or if the vagary has a death anim.

 

With my lantern bot, when he dies all the joints that are in a body and constrained stop moving because the contraints are from the AF file and attached to those specific joints. The af file takes the anims from the af_anim, which is blank, no movement.

What made me realize this is that the gauge needle on my bot belongs to the 'waist' body, which itself is not constrained. But it doesn't matter that the waist itself is not constrained, it doesn't have any anims anyway, the needle itself is not constrained. Therefore there is nothing in the af to tell it to stop. It moves in all of the anims so if he is killed during idle, walk or search it will keep going with that anim info.

Also, during the anims he lets out a steampuff every 20 frames. When he dies he still emits steam every 20 frames, he needs to switch to a death anim that has no steam declared and that stops the needle from moving.

The steampipe cap stops moving, but it has a body and a fixed constraint, so the AF is telling it to stop moving.

 

The spider is a little more complicated to describe so bare with:

The spiders legs are grouped into 4 bodies. the right 2 front legs are in one body and constrained. back 2 right legs, front 2 left, ect...

This is at the main joint touching the body. The tops of the legs stop when he is dead, as does the head (that is the 5th and last contrained body on the spider).

But the 2 or 3 joints further down the leg are just children of the top legs, they have no bodies of their own and they are not constrained.

So the end of the legs keep working whatever anim they were doing when the spider died.

This is exactly how the vagary works, she had a body for each top and mid leg. But the joints after the mid leg don't have bodies of their own and they are not directly constrained. They keep twitching but her upper legs stop.

I don't know if she has a death anim or not, when I killed her once she fell flat on her face and kept twitching (that's why I initially thought it might be a creepy spider code thing)

 

So if it happens with guards too we really need to fix this at the death anim. We need to make sure that the death anim brings all joints to a rest and stops at the end instead of cycling like other anims. How to do this I don't know, haven't really given the death anims much thought until now.

 

The other fix would be to constrain every single joint in a body of its own at a high cost to performance. Right now the spider is very effiecient.

[Springheel]

So if it happens with guards too we really need to fix this at the death anim.

 

We've never planned to call death animations by default...they were supposed to be a random thing, like TDS. I'm sure there's a way to stop all animations on death without requiring a death animation--in fact, at various stages the AI has not had this problem, but it seems like it gets reintroduced from time to time.