Ecstasy is HERE!!!

Ecstasy is HERE!!

(Special Torque Early Adopter Love Edition)

After what felt like forever, but was really only a few crazy months of hyperactive round-the-clock dev time, I'm proud, nay, overjoyed to be the one who gets to make the announcement:
BrokeAss Games HAS RELEASED the Early Adopter Edition of Ecstasy, our new animation editor, mocap tweaker, physics and dynamic motion tool for game developers, animators and film makers!

[EDIT: We have just released Ecstasy Early Adopter! See my new blog for details.]

But first, I just have to share with the world a little glimpse of what my day was like yesterday.


It's always fun to watch the guy jumping around in the suit, but imagine being the guy!

The first program, with the rigid body stick figure, is Arena, Natural Point's software tool for their Opti-Track System - which is hands down the most effective and affordable motion capture system you can buy. The next application you see is Ecstasy, streaming from Arena directly into a game engine for the first time ever!

If you're going to SIGGRAPH this year, come look for us at the Natural Point booth (across from Autodesk). After meeting the Opti-Track guys at GDC a couple of months ago, we decided to work together and we will be demoing Ecstasy alongside their Opti-Track rigs in New Orleans. You'll see live actors on the mocap stage interacting with rigid bodies and animated characters, in a T3D-powered game environment.

To the best of my knowledge, this is a Historic Torque Moment: As of yesterday, we have a motion capture suit that doubles as a full-body game input device!


So, what is this Ecstasy program I speak of? As the title bar suggests, Ecstasy is Dynamic Motion for Independent Developers. It's a physics and motion-capture based method of getting a lot of high quality animation content into your game, fast. It brings capabilities to the table that would have cost you thousands of dollars, before Ecstasy -- if you could find them at all...

Making character animation by hand is an incredibly difficult job. There are a lot of highly skilled people in the game industry who do it beautifully, but even for them it takes a lot of time, and for most of us regular mortals, making believable human animation by dragging bodyparts around with your mouse is just an exercise in frustration.



Fortunately, growing availability of motion capture data, not to mention increasingly affordable rigs like Opti-Track, might help save the day for the indie developer.

Motion capture data has its issues, however. A lot of it ends up with the actor pointing the wrong way, or floating a couple of feet off the ground, or including too many bodyparts. At the very least you are bound to spend a lot of time cropping out the bits you actually need and exporting them to the format required by your game engine.

This is the first and most obvious place where Ecstasy comes in handy. Ecstasy reads mocap data from the common BVH format, turns it into a Torque sequence and loads it onto a DTS model. Once there, you can modify whatever joint rotations and body positions you want to. You can remove nodes that aren't doing anything from the sequence, and you can save out just the arm data or just the leg data. You can easily and quickly crop the anim up into multiple shorter named sequences, and you can save them out as dsq files. You can also export them back into BVH files, for import into non-Torque applications.

Ecstasy lets you load up BVH files in groups, a directory at a time, while applying the same modifications to each file -- to help you handle cases where an entire batch of data is borked in exactly the same way. Since we invented it, we've been using Ecstasy ourselves practically every day, and now we can hardly imagine life without it!




One of the best things about Ecstasy is that not only does it do all this useful stuff for you, but it does it all in a game engine. Of course, we're gamers ourselves, so we'd always prefer to be able to get our work done without ever having to leave the game environment... but beyond that, there are concrete advantages to doing your animation editing, and even your capture sessions, in a live Torque environment.

For one thing, you have a guaranteed WYSIWYG situation -- what you see is what you're going to get in game, no questions asked. No export process that can introduce artifacts. No extra steps. When you're done, you're done.


Having full access to the latest, greatest, raw T3D rendering power also means that you can also pull out another whole part of the Swiss Army Knife that is Ecstasy. Using its playlists and camera controls, along with all the scripting power you already know exists in the Torque engine, you can easily set up machinima scenes in Ecstasy. You can then capture them with something like FRAPS, and depending on what you're doing, this may be your final result, or it might be just a quick sketch for the movie you're making in your favorite film editing software.


All that stuff is pretty darn useful, but we're not even close to done yet.... Besides all the animation editing options Ecstasy provides, you may have noticed something else: Ecstasy has physics.

Ecstasy comes with several common Torque skeletons as well as the BrokeAss Advanced Character Kit models already rigged with ragdoll skeletons, and it's a relatively straightforward matter to set up your own model. Once there, you can record ragdoll sequences all day long, and save them out in DSQ or BVH format.

Many Garage Gamers who've been around since the beginning will remember my Ragdoll Animation Pack, which graphically demonstrated the value of pre-recording your ragdoll effects in certain situations -- like when you want to run a whole lot of them on less than top-of-the-line hardware.



But Ecstasy doesn't stop there, either! We don't just give you dead ragdoll effects...

In Ecstasy, your ragdoll can stop flopping around uselessly, and actually move under its own power!!


That's right -- Ecstasy has scripted motor forces. In the Early Adopter version of Ecstasy this part is still a little cryptic, but basically, if you want to badly enough, you can write a script which tells your character in any amount of detail exactly what motor forces to apply, to what bodyparts, at what times. This means, for example, that you could design crazy spider robots and then make them walk and jump and fight in Ecstasy, with all the bouncing and stuttering that you'd expect from a live physics simulation. That's what we call Dynamic Motion.


So, I think I've said about enough for now. It's coming out soon, like as in the next few days.

And now for the big pricing announcement: the Early Adopter Edition is coming out for only $149.95.

But wait... as a special thank you to the Torque community, we are offering the Special Torque Early Adopter Love edition, to Torque users only, for an absolutely ridiculous price of $99.95!! S.T.E.A.L. users will be fully licensed Ecstasy owners, entitled to receive all future updates and bug fixes.

Keep your eyes peeled in the next couple of days for our "Buy Now" blog, or go register yourself right now on our site, www.ecstasymotion.com, to make sure you don't miss it!!!