Random Animations--possible?

[Springheel]

This might be possible already, I don't know.

 

What I'm hoping is that we can have animations work like sounds do. When we call a sound, we actually refer to a soundshader that has a list of sounds, and one sound from that list is called randomly. Could we do the same for animations? Squill has made two equally good failed KO animations, and it would be far more realistic if AI didn't use the exact same animation every time. Any chance we can set up lists of animations to select from randomly?

[Schatten]

This would be rather usefull for idle animations as well.

[Gildoran]

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about monster scripting and animations, but it's possible to pick a random number in a script... so maybe it would be possible to just have the scripts randomly choose the animation, even if there's no SDK support for it?

[Solis]

I've wondered this as well, and I'm pretty positive it's possible since even Half-life 1 had support for that. But I'm not sure how it works exactly in the Doom 3 engine, it might be something you can do through a def file but I'm not certain about that. Scripts could probably do it since from what I understand they simply link assets together even if they're MD5anim files.

 

Another idea I had that I'm not aware of the engine actually supporting is the option of having an animation played from a range between two other animations. So basically, you'd have two animations of the same action, each slightly different, and then the end animation that plays would be anywhere between those two points (for example a person stretching with his arms do his sides and another with him stretching with his arms upwards, and the final animation could be stretching directly outward, slightly upwards, slightly downwards, fully upwards; basically any possible position between the two animations).

 

Essentially it would simply be interpolating the bone positions between two absolute values for each frame of the animation. I'm not sure how hard it would be to impliment though, but it was something I thought of years ago and never really had the chance to do it, so if anyone else thinks that would actually work feel free to chime in.

[Ishtvan]

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about monster scripting and animations, but it's possible to pick a random number in a script... so maybe it would be possible to just have the scripts randomly choose the animation, even if there's no SDK support for it?

Yeah, that would be easy to do, just have the anims named <anim name>_1 <anim_name>_2 etc.

 

A more advanced way would be to make a new anim decl type and a new play anim command that automatically chooses a random one from the ones listed in the decl, but I'm not sure if that would be worth it or not.

[sparhawk]

A random anim picker would definitely be worthwhile and it shouldn't be hard to do that. We talked about this early in the beginning. How would this currently work? If we have a guard standing idle, we would like it to make all kind of random animations like ywaning, turning, coughing, etc.. I thought that this is already possible?

[Springheel]

There are two slightly different uses for this.

 

One, we absolutely need, and that's for randomly playing idle animations. That requires calling an animation at randomly determined intervals while the AI is in an idle state (which must be possible since D3 does it for head turning already). It also requires selecting from a list of possible idle animations (yawn, stretch, cough, etc).

 

The second use is to select from multiple versions of the same animation. So if we have three different search animations, and the AI goes into search mode, it randomly picks one of the three to play. This would add some variety to the way the AI move, which is beneficial for animations that they do a lot (like searching, walking, etc).

 

We would probably want to do something like the above for combat as well, randomly picking between various attack animations.

[Springheel]

Yeah, that would be easy to do, just have the anims named <anim name>_1 <anim_name>_2 etc.

 

Do we need to talk about naming conventions? If we have to change the name of an animation later, wouldn't that also mean having to change all the .def files as well? Better to avoid that if possible.

 

Maybe it would be worth thinking about this now before we get too many to handle, especially since we're starting to work on idle animations which definitely will need to be randomized. Or is there a way that we can randomize them regardless of what they're called?

[ascottk]

Do we need to talk about naming conventions? If we have to change the name of an animation later, wouldn't that also mean having to change all the .def files as well? Better to avoid that if possible.

 

Maybe it would be worth thinking about this now before we get too many to handle, especially since we're starting to work on idle animations which definitely will need to be randomized. Or is there a way that we can randomize them regardless of what they're called?

It doesn't matter what the *.md5anim name is as long as the def anim has the proper name. I could easily point an idle animation to attack.md5anim. Anim decls won't be a problem to rename & I agree that we need naming conventions for those.