Dev Blog #42: More Animation Work

Some raw mo-cap data on a preview skeleton

After our huge mo-cap recording session last week, we've been working on cleaning up the data and prepping the animations for use in game. So far the results look like a huge improvement, and we're all extremely excited to get the whole batch imported in a rough state for us to preview.

The above GIF is a sample of some raw mo-cap data, on a preview skeleton; there are still numerous tweaks such as adding hand animations, blending between different states at the end of the attack, and more. Even in this raw state, they already look far superior to the previous batch.

In other animations news, we've also been overhauling the player's attack animations and camera movements. Another common piece of feedback we've gotten time and time again from you guys is that the player's attacks didn't feel impactful enough; they're already looking much, much better. Once we've imported the new NPC hit reactions and tie them all together with the player's attacks, it will be a huge improvement over the earlier version we showed in our last trailer.

We also made some further progress on optimization. In this case, it meant going over each and every material in the project, and packing some textures even more efficiently. Overall combined with last week's work, this has resulted in huge texture memory savings. We've actually got a pretty safe margin at the moment when it comes to our minimum and recommended GPU specs, which means we can push certain things even further before launch.

Lastly, more progress has been made on saving/loading; items and player inventory are now successfully saved, which was one of the larger challenges. Also, saving/loading speed has been increased by 1000%. Yes, that is a real statistic, the new method we built is literally 1000 times faster. Feels good.

Adam