Spheroid

[FromSoySauce]

Hello I am From Soy Sauce, my brothers and I have been working on a game all summer. It's a first/third person shooter that's based on Metroid Prime Hunters and Armored Core 2. I wanted to make a heads up that we intend to launch a crowed funding campaign next week. If you want to help people to be aware of this project, feel free to share the video.


Heads-up video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbP6Gy7KbRk

The game is graphically designed to resemble old 3D CG animations such as: Beast Wars, War Planets, and Bionicles.

The Spheroids are a race of golems with transformation abilities. They fight against the Zinth, angels sent to destroy all of the world.

[TheShyGuy]

I watched videos of your other game Difference and they look amazing. I actually watched other videos too and saw that all they're all in GameMaker..... Wow....All I can say is goodluck with both of these games.

[FromSoySauce]

Thanks, Difference is my personal project, a game that is quite ambitions. Spheroid is a team project that is much simpler in scale and detail. So, I want to finish Spheroid first. Afterwords, I can devote my full concentration to making Difference the best game it can be.

Yes, I do currently use Game Maker, I actually imagined it being able to pull off the things you see in my videos way back when I started using it, back in 2007. Maybe, these games can inspire others to create more ambitious projects with GM.

[TheShyGuy]

I noticed that there is 'foot slip' during animations. So I assume that you coded the movement in instead of by animation? Although this isn't my quote, this guy said what I wanted to say better than I did at the time.

Spoiler

What you are looking for is called Motion Extraction, or sometimes also called Root Motion.

Sometimes it is also referred to Variable Motion Extraction, because the motion is not constant, but defined by some node inside the motion itself.

What you basically do is take a given root node, for example the Hip node, and extract the translation and rotation delta from that for the given frame.

Then you filter that transform, to for example only rotate around the up axis, and capture only movement on the ground plane.

Then instead of applying this transformation to the hip node, you apply it to your actor itself.

Your motion is now driving the position and rotation of your character.

When you blend two animations together, for example if you blend between a walk and run motion, you should calculate the delta movement from each motion, and blend these two delta transforms by the same weight as you blend your motions.

This is the basic idea. There are several things you have to take into account, such as looping and scaling of your character.

Your animations will not be in-place animations anymore, but they have to move away from the origin (in case of moving forward or so).

With that advice, you should have alot more control over movement as an animator. However, animations like jumping would still need to be coded in the game.

It was hard to tell, but if you've ever experienced an effect from shooting really fast moving projectiles, like bullets, and they seem to be remaining in place?- It looks like the bullets have a fixed position? The solution to this is to interpolate the world transforms from the last few frames. I'm unsure how much control you have in GM, but I hope these two details help you out in someway.

[FromSoySauce]

I'm sorry, I have no idea what you are saying... But I can say this, all the animation was done by one person, and all the coding was done by another.

[TheShyGuy]

Oh, uuuummm. Well I wasn't attacking or insulting the animations at all or the coding (just in case that's what you were thinking?). I was just trying to help and give a few tips.

By foot slip, I'm referring to when the feet slide on the ground when walking or running. I can't find a vid on youtube showing it sorry. It's not that big of a deal, so don't worry about it too much.

[FromSoySauce]

Oh I'm not offended. I mean, obviously since you took such time to make a detailed post about it, you must care.

I'm just kind of disappointed to have to inform you that your post has left me confused, because I am not very savvy when it comes to technical terms of animation or coding or math. I'm just an artist who knows enough to get whatever I want to see in playable form.

I think I know what you mean by "foot slip." My guess is that must be the technical term for what I've always known as "skate running." Improved animations may very well be something I need to get the funding for. Thank you for noticing!

[TheShyGuy]

If you know what it is, that's just as good! Anyways, if you have any control over how animations are applied to the character, you should have enough control to fix the "skate running". The gist of my above post is to extract out a *bone animation result (the delta translation, rotation or scale) for some unique bone, and apply that to your #character's transform (position, rotation ,and or scale). Oh yea, don't apply the unique bone's transform keyframe at all to the actual animation since your already using it. So for example, when you animate translation, you animate the unique bone as the "movement" bone.

*Oh yea, the unique bone should be a bone that moves the entire character's body (something similar to the root bone).

#This should be the in-game character's transform. It shouldn't be the mesh,or model. Hmm, I have very little experience with GM. But I know every object has an "x","y" property. These are the "type" of properties that should be affected.

When you animate something like a run cycle, you animate it "for real". The character actually runs without "foot skating" in the animation. The bone you use to actually move, again, is some unique bone that you have chosen.

Some pros besides fixing the skating issue is that now you have alot more control over the movement and feel of a character. The speed at which your character runs depends on the speed at which you animated him running. If you decide to also use and extract the rotation, then you can do things like spinning or turning (I couldn't think of anything else, these aren't the best examples) in-game through the animation.

If there's anything you need, just ask.

-----

When you animate something like a run or walk loop, you should animate the movement last. That way, you can make sure the animation loops properly.

[FromSoySauce]

The Indiegogo campaign is finally set up! Please support us if you want to! Otherwise please help spread awareness! Thanks!
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sphero...2426#share
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWA920LNm...bedded#t=8

[FromSoySauce]

Playable Demo:
https://app.box.com/s/0gxv3o74skmovhh1dhqn