Animation Improvements – Realized

September 21, 2018

Last week I set about designing the infrastructure for new animation methods to be used in the Sleuthhounds: Cruise game. After completing the design, I moved on to implementing it in the game engine itself. I was pleased to find that unifying the existing animation methods and adding new ones in was easier than I had anticipated.

Homes blinking and idling.

In addition to the previous abilities of being able to walk, talk, and run ad hoc animations, the game engine now allows characters to blink and to run assorted fidget animations when they’ve been standing still long enough (as shown above). It also has internal support for a character’s head to look in a direction other than the way the character’s body is facing; however, I’ve not created the interface for that ability to be called from the game scripts just yet.

Animation is quite intrinsic to a number of areas in the game engine. While everything seems to be ticking along quite nicely now, I would be unsurprised if one or two fringe case bugs still exist in the new code. These will get ironed out as they come up. In the meantime, it’s quite nice to see the characters fidgeting about even at this rough point in the game’s development.

Previous:   |   Next: