Dev Blog #41: Mo cap, Mo combat

So much mo cap. So many new animations (214, to be exact!). So many sore muscles. Worth it!

At long last we finally got back into some more mo-cap this week. Our animations are, frankly, one of the weakest points in the game currently, and we've gotten a fair bit of feedback over the past months. We've been extremely eager to remedy this, and have put a great deal of thought into why the last batch didn't turn out, and how we should go about improving them.

In short, the animations overall need more... oomph. The impacts were not forceful enough, the run cycles weren't "immediate" enough, and the combat felt too stiff in general. With this new batch, we've put extra attention into making every animation feel natural, emotional, and forceful.

We've also rethought our combat AI behaviors. They're going to be much more mobile and reactive, with abilities like dodging and counter attacks.

None of these new animations have been integrated yet of course, we have to clean up the data and "solve" them onto our in-game models, but even looking at the raw data already looks like a huge improvement.

In other news, we've made some *MASSIVE* VRAM savings by painstakingly sorting through each and every texture in the game, and optimizing texture size, packing, and compression methods. We managed to reduce our current VRAM usage by over 1GB, and somehow actually increased the resolution on many textures while doing so. I'd call that a win!

What else... more progress on saving and loading, which is an arduous process but is going well, more environmental design work, NPC model progress, utility attachments... lots of good stuff this week.

Adam