Comments on: Tiny Things Sure Can Be Annoying…

By: GameProducer.Net » Tiny Annoying Things Can Be Solved

GameProducer.Net » Tiny Annoying Things Can Be Solved — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:42:16 +0000

[...] week I mentioned some tiny problems we had with the character animations. I’m pleased to announce that those problems are now [...]

By: Juuso

Juuso — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:52:45 +0000

Thanks guys… we are about to get the thing solved. I really appreciate your help and support!

Biscuit – heh, shit happens :)

By: Videogame Biscuit

Videogame Biscuit — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:09:51 +0000

I had an incredibly annoying problem with collision responses in a sprite based game. When the player and an enemy collided, they were both reset to the starting position. The problem was, even though I had coordinates hard-coded into the game, they would pop up on random locations from time to time! It took me a few days to figure out what exactly went wrong. The problem was, when the player and an enemy collided, the collision was still happening while the event handler code was executed, and both objects kept moving even after they returned to their start positions. Finally fixed the problem, but definitely not something I want to happen every day!

By: Sarper

Sarper — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:37:03 +0000

For the looping problem, you have to edit the finished animation by hand as there is no other way to make it loop.Same goes for the “translating” animation.As you said, game production may be a little pain in the a** but when you get over those problems you will have %100 self confidence and motivation to work and improve your game!

Cheers!

By: Riven

Riven — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 20:50:29 +0000

Simply pick 1 node that you think is representative for the players position, say: the head.

Follow that node throughout the recorded animation.

For every frame:
- calculate the translation between that node in the current frame, and that node in the first frame (this is a 3d vector)
- now translate all nodes *back* by that vector

Now the head-node is always at the same fixed point in model-space. Problem solved!

By: Producer

Producer — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:40:28 +0000

We had this exact problem with our character animations.
The issue was that the animations had the character actually moving in the original Max file. By moving, I do not mean the leg and arm movements, but the entire model was moving as well. When you are using the engine scripts to handle moving the 3D object, the animation being called should be a simple moving of the skeleton, but without any model co-ordinate changes.
Doing this will correct you character movements. Hope this helps. Email me if you have any other questions about this.