An old friends is back, mr “Weekly meeting”. It’s been a while but yesterday he was back. We only discussed the feedback we got from all the people playing PoH at GGA and what we should do about it. It was things from easier way to hit enemies, animation corrections, character tweaking to leveling suggestions. Some of the things will take about 1h to change/try while other things might take up to a week to change (for one person) so after we have put everything down on paper we’ll estimate how long it will take to do and what priority it has.

We also discussed how much people can work this summer and what time they will be away on vacations.

So, time is starting to run out and the things to do starts to really pile up and in the middle of is half of the team is going to Nordic Games next week.

Code
- Sound & Music (Jakob)
- Change diffuse light (Baba)
- Calibrate particle effects (Baba)
- Optimize code (Jakob & Baba)
- Vertex shader (Baba)
- Game over screen (Jakob)
- Movement & camera (Nixi & Baba)

Animation
- Collision boxes (Tobbe & Jona)
- Frame on character that will detect damage (Tobbe & Jona & Nixi)

Level optimization
-Level 1 (Dwarf)
-Level 2 (Dwarf)

Trailer
- Content (Stoff)

Exhibition booth
- Get all measures & printing details (Stoff)

Other thing
- Gameplay test on Friday, demo done on Thursday

During the last week I’ve done extensive testing on how to implement 3D animation. There are two ways to go about this: Write everything from scratch, which is hard to do because of the limited time we have for this project, or use an existing library. I have found three libraries that work on both PC and Xbox.

KiloWatt is by far the best library. Fast and versitile, but with the drawback of beeing complicated to use and it having no documentation what so ever. Is took me about a day to write a wrapper for KiloWatt. The wrapper makes it really easy to load and play animations.

Many people using KiloWatt have had problems with playback of short animations. If the animation contains to few frames, the last frame is padded to get the correct length. This makes the animation ”freeze” once every loop cycle.

The problem is actually caused by the XNA .X importer and not KiloWatt. There are two ways to fix this. One is to filter out and remove duplicate frames in the content proccessor and the second ,easy but uggly way, is to change the NumFrames field in the KiloWatt animation class when loading the models. The padded frames will still be there, but they will not be played.

Whew, what a day, hours upon hours of animation using our new animation work flow of no more than 30 minutes to 1hour per animation.

/wp-content/uploads/llaknel_animations.flv

Here’s an upload of some of the animations to show off what you can get and how much you can actually do in just a few hours if you have an alarm clock that goes off once per hour to stop you from dwelling upon tiny details. It’s not the finished products but it’s a bit on the way.

Hopefully there will also be an opportunity for me to get the animation up to a higher standard and time to put them off to show the difference.

Back to work on Llaknel again, the scales have been set and today I’ve rigged and skinned him.
The rig is an ordinary Biped and using fewer bones than I would have prefered I’ve gotten the skinning to work, seems the model was a success.

When the skinning is 100% done I’ll start ranting about animations.

Yesterday I’ve finally fixed the last parts of Llaknel’s face mesh and after that was finished I had enough time to re-model his weaponry.

Today I might have finally finished the Llaknel mesh just gotta send it in for a final revision, I’ve made the arms into separate elements from the rest of the mesh, this should help in preventing weird artifacts during animation it should also make skinning the character much faster.

Now a little about PoH, … so me and Tobias finally sat down and fixed a basic bone animation for our project. It worked nicely and I feel that animation wont be a problem in the project. I also wrote a kind of basic particle system that used the gpu for animating the particle system.