Would PA support organic models and animations?

If it support those things, that would open up a lot of possibilities for modding, like a TA:Kingdoms remake. If it deosn't, then that might be good for performance.

Wow, TA:Kingoms. The only game that ever disappointed me as much as supcom 2...

I hope at the very least we get some kind of mesh deformation, and a skeletal structure for units too.

TA, TA:K, SC, SC2, PA
Good, Bad, Good, Bad, GOOD!

*phew*

Even if not outright organic...I am sure that a Necron-style army would be interesting...more skeletal designs and so forth.



The "flayed ones" draped flesh on their mechanical bodies. Could model that and color it like flesh and whatnot...from the level of zoom many people will be at it would be difficult to notice movement that finite anyway:

Necron type units are easy enough without full on skeleton Rigs and Mesh deformation, what the OP is asking for is different from that.

Honestly I'm not sure how feasible and/or how it'd be at this scale, but if it can be implemented without serious overhead it would just allow for more options down the road.

Mike

Sorry for posting in this old thread, but I was wondering about the same thing, and almost started a new thread, than I found this .

I was wondering will PA allow rendering/creating of organic units/beings like zerg for example to allow more options for creative moders?

We support full on skeletal rigs using an animation node type system. Currently there is no shader setup for actual skinning but the pipeline would be easy to push in that direction.

Animation is one of the (many) areas that we've made significant departures from previous setups.

You keep teasing me with all your vague comments on the Animation aspect, I eagerly await some in-depth info at some point!

Mike

Thanks for a great response (and a quick one )

Well it's hard to write comprehensive stuff about things that aren't finished, it's still evolving.

The main thing is to remove the animation from the simulation as much as possible (you still need it in a little bit in certain cases). Then general idea is that the animation state of the unit is driven from the sim state and not the other way around. This means we don't need to be running all of the animations in the sim all of the time which gives us a nice speed boost. It's also necessary for ChronoCam that we can reconstruct animation state for time t throughout the game.

So one of the nice practical aspects of this is that we can do a lot more with anim blending and control but not pay the price for that when the unit isn't on screen. We could also potentially do anim LOD etc.

I suppose the little bit in certain cases would revolve around telling the sim where the firing points for weapons end up after an animation?

I'm still crossing my fingers here for a much more fluid animation for units aiming & firing, especially bipedal units with guns on their arms.

Ahhh you're doing it again! xD I really can't wait to see what surprises the animation stuff will have!

Mike