Animation blending?

[ScottS]

I think this should be added to the engine, if you want the characters to look up and down or strafe while firing without extra animations then this is the way to go. Of course I'm assuming the .zym format is skeletal. While I'm not a programmer, I imagine that adding this in wont be as much work as say recreating all new character models and the animations.

While I'm sure Lord Havoc and the other Nexuiz programmers are familiar with the theory heres a few links anyway to browse.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030 ... l_01.shtml
http://www.robthebloke.org/demos.htm
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=468619

I realise this isnt some majorly important thing that will have any effect on gameplay, but I think its worth looking into.

[zuriastrad]

i get the impression that "animation blending" refers to smoothing transitions between different animations, not running multiple animations at the same time. for example, if you suddenly switch from running forwards to crouching down the two animations are pretty different and there will be a visible jump from one to the other. animation blending would interpolate between the animations for a more natural look.

but yes, i do agree that the game should be able to do more than one animation at the same time. one way around this would be to go with the quake3 style segmented model. this is where the character is broken down into 3 parts...
1. legs and hips
2. torso and arms
3. head
...this means that you can have the legs doing the run cycle while the arms are doing a reload movement or taunt. sadly quake3 used the md3 model format which i personally think is a fairly crappy format, but i can't think of any reason why the same thing with a skeletal model format like zym or dpm wouldn't work. i think the md3 system used tags to show where to attach the next model, but with a skeletal format like zym a bone could be used, which would be a neater solution. i don't know if any gamecode would need to be changed to attach the models together or whether it could be done with a simple script, but it's an interesting possibility.

[ScottS]

Actually animation blending is for both of the things you mentioned. The legs and hips play a running or strafing animation while the torso and arms fire, reload, aim etc and theres a smooth transition when animations change. This sort of thing has been around since Half-life and even golden-eye on the N64