Jul 22
Very quick update
Just a quick note that the bare bones animation system I mentioned before is now working. ”Actors” are shared, so you only have one copy of each animated model in memory (although that detail is hidden from game code). Each animated model can have any number of animations. Each instance of each actor can have a different animation playing at any given time, or can be at a different position within each animation.
Stuff that’s still left to do on the animation system:
- Flagging animations as “loop”, “ping-pong”, or “play once then stop” (currently, they all loop).
- Consider spline-based interpolations between keyframes (currently, linear).
- Consider supporting material animations.
Sorry for lack of updates this week; most of my time and attention has been going to the day job. Haven’t had a lot of free time this week, so I’ve been spending that free time pretty much exclusively on coding MT2, rather than on updating this web site. Hopefully back to more frequent progress updates this weekend/next week!
July 23rd, 2010 at 2:34 am
Ping-pong?
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:48 am
I believe that means that the animation will go in reverse once it has completed, and will then reverse again, etc. So if there were 5 frames, it would draw frame 1, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, and so on.
July 23rd, 2010 at 10:44 am
That’s exactly right. Ping-pong animation is useful for keeping memory usage low for certain types of cyclic animation.
The other thing which I forgot to mention in the post is adding support for blending between animations. I have about half the work done for supporting that, so far.
July 25th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Ah, good, then my assumption was correct.