Page 1 of 1

skeletal animations and multiplayer

Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 1:32 am
by berserk
as in subject, why don't add skeletal animations (with procedural weighting) and multiplayer (network) features?

Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 7:58 am
by Rado1
Hi berserk, networking features on Windows are available through the external library 39DLLzge, which is a wrapper to networking libraries Winsock 2, WinINet, etc. It is possible to use it for multiplyer quite easily.

Skeletal animations would be little bit tricky, but can be imitated even with the existing features. Unfortunately, you need to program animation by yourself, and I'm afraid of performance of continuous mesh recomputation. Instead, I would recommend to divide your model to smaller rigid parts which are animated by transformations separately, relatively to other parts.

Ville, any ideas about built-in support for skeletal animations in ZGE? For instance, how far is implementation of ideas discussed here?

Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 8:17 am
by VilleK
Hi berserk and welcome to the forum.
Rado1 wrote:Ville, any ideas about built-in support for skeletal animations in ZGE?
We have had this discussion a couple of times before but never came up with a solution that seemed simple enough to fit in the ZGE engine. I want to add support for it some day but at the moment all development effort is on porting existing features to the Android version.

simple is enough

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 8:34 am
by berserk
i don't think we need complex weighting unless someone's using zge in an animation studio.
what i have in my mind is some kind of auto-weighting while using producers to emulate the mesh subdivision, yet keeping the surface single, and or to weight the nearest vertex to a bone, maybe with influence radius.
i say and or because i mean to let the user choose depending on the case.
that's for rigging, while for animating, animator component could do very well the interpolation.
reproducibg the bone animation is matter of any game engine and there's plenty of informations about that on the internet.
what do you think about this?

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 9:25 pm
by jonaspm
i would like this too :3