Ecstasy Motion Approaches 1.0

Hey, guess what? Ecstasy Motion is almost done!




HA HA HA HA HA!

Just kidding. Actually, Ecstasy Motion is always getting better, and I'm pretty sure I won't ever really consider it "finished". However, we are nearing a very important milestone in our development. After two and a half years of ceaseless toil and struggle, we are finally reaching the end... of the Early Adopter period!

In other words, we have finally reached the point where the program does everything we originally set out to make it do (and then some.) Consequently, sometime during or immediately after the weekend of November 25-27, we will be setting the price to $199 - and forever closing the door on your opportunity to be part of our Early Adopter Club! For the next three weeks, however, it is still only $149 to get in the door. And as an Early Adopter, you get all future upgrades to the standalone product for FREE.

This blog is just a warning shot across the bow... letting you know I plan to spend the next three weeks convincing you, the average Torque User, that you need this program, you want this program, and you might as well save yourself fifty bucks and buy it right now!

If you're already convinced, grab your credit card and hit the jump: www.ecstasymotion.com


BTW, we export to FBX now... hear us roar!

NEW FEATURES

Like I said, I'll be blogging about this for the next three weeks, so I'm not going to spill all my beans on the first day. However, in the months since you heard from us last, there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes.

One major thing, that has been on the list for a very long time, is FBX export. That opened a whole can of worms that I was hoping to avoid until after v1.0 came out... but I just couldn't stop myself. There is still fine tuning to do, but as you can see above, textured skinmesh objects with animations are successfully converting from DTS/DSQ format into FBX. 'Nuff said about that for now.

Realtime Motion Capture With Kinect

Although we've been spread pretty thin, and hence have not had as much time to put into Kinect research as we would have liked, we did make a couple of important strides toward making this device usable for purposes of motion capture.



One of the ones we're most proud of was in relation to the fact that the OpenNI skeleton only has one node for the entire torso, from the hips to the head. We broke this up and averaged the data out over several nodes, and came out with much more pleasing results. We won't lie to you, this thing is still not going to be a replacement for "real" mocap systems anytime soon... but given the price, we are very interested in squeezing the best possible results out of it regardless. If you buy Ecstasy Motion and tell us that this is your primary area of interest, we will squeeze it even harder!

Scenes with Actor Groups, Weapons and Combat AI

Although it is worth buying just as a Torque-based animation editor with physics, the real power of Ecstasy Motion appears when you start using it to construct scenes. Whether you are working on a full length feature film or just a cut scene for your game, Ecstasy helps automate a tremendous amount of animator busywork.



With the lastest updates to Ecstasy Motion, we can now assign our virtual actors to different actor groups, give them weapons with various attack animations and damage results, and then tell the groups to attack each other. In the end, the entire scene is saved out as a set of sequences, one per actor, with all of the physics and AI baked in. These sequences can then be exported to BVH or FBX, or used in Torque as DSQs.

Data Sharing

One thing about Ecstasy Motion that I didn't much like to talk about, but was always in the back of my mind, was the problem of data sharing. Ecstasy Motion is built entirely around an SQLite database, which gives us tremendous power to expand infinitely in all directions, and I've never been sorry I made that decision. However, the one major drawback to going down that road was the fact that I had no clean way to exchange data between users.



Well, it took about a week of writing and testing SQL code, but now I have a new panel at the bottom of the tools window which solves this problem! You make your own database for your project, and then you can import scenes, actors, and so forth from our samples or from your friend's database.

Get Ready, It's Coming...

Like I said at the top, this is really just a warmup blog for the next three weeks. I hope you are convinced and buy it right now, but be warned that we are still pulling this build together - that's why it isn't 1.0 quite yet. In particular, most of the documentation is not up to date, but we have a whole crew of interns from Lane Community College hammering away on that problem as we speak! (Thanks, guys!!) I will make a prominent announcement when the new docs are ready for review.

That's all for now, happy devving!

Chris Calef
CTO
BrokeAss Games