Hello we just wanted to give you feedback on what we are doing. This time we do not have any screenshots because we are changing big parts of the engine. This will be also the case in the following weeks.
Animation System
Except for one little problem we nearly finished the new client side animation system. For this we changed the way how we store our rotations from euler to quaternion. This will also simplify the import of models.
The new animation system will support blending and composing of an unlimited amount of animations. That means that all animations will be totally smooth. And also that the monster will be better moving on the ground.
We also thought about adding advanced stuff like retargeting and compression of motion capture data.
And to the little problem. In AAA games it is common to have something which is called blend space or a blend tree. This allows the easy composition of all types of animations. An example here would be walking and running. This algorithm can then calculate the animation for half walking and half running. We will also use something similar to this but we still need to decide how to calculate the amount of impact each single animation has to the final animation. For the 1D case this is trivial. For the 2D not. But of course we will find a solution.
But the cool thing is that we now need much less animations because a lot of them can be generated on the fly.
Models
We recreated nearly all of the first person animations for our new character model Lisa. That means that in the next big release the black hand will disappear. The cool thing is that these animations are compatible with the third person mode. So they can be used there too. -> less work
And we collected a lot of motion capture data which we will use to create realistic motions for all our game characters. I am also thinking here about NPCs!
Water flow
All physic objects are now affected by the flow of the water. We also created a special water update mode which improves the update speed.
Hierarchical entities
The system now supports hierarchical enitites. That allows use to create complexe game items.
Secret stuff
And I am experimenting with something really cool which will improve the gameplay (hopefully :-) ). But I will take about it later.