Dia Diez: Animacion

One of the ideas behind Arroyo Seco was to make the player feel as though he's a small part of a big, conflicted world, by having action going on around him. It is also a showcase for the AI I'm working on, so today's task was to tweak 'the little things' aesthetically around the level, and continue adding bestiary AI.

I'd been testing the level so far using a version of the MMO dragon that Sean Rice re-worked to serve as our test beast. A Tolkeinesque 'Smaug' didn't fit with the theme of the level or game, so I found a suitable replacement on TurboSquid, imported it into Max and went to town using DoIt! to add collision, nodes and bounding box. My first export looked great but killed my framerate. I re-did it using ProOptimizer and got it down to the same face/poly count as the MMO dragon and now it works great, and really blends in with the stark look of the level.

One of the things Sean and I have worked the hardest on is making SENTIENCE as flexible as possible. I literally had the new 'Quetzalcuatl' model rigged and scripted while I had my morning coffee. By late morning before a session, had the new beast in-game. Obviously, I have quite a bit of work to go on the AI but all the elements of the level look cohesive to the player. I'm also re-working the Bravetree Nature Pack birds to serve as fodder to keep the dragons fed. You see, if they run out of birds and small quadrapeds, they start hunting humans... It also feels more realistic to see them hunt food rather than fly after health potions randomly scattered about.

Here's a few shots of the Quetzalcuatl in action, assembled in iMovie [hence the jaggies]. In the first few frames you see one succumb to friendly fire and die. I stopped and fixed the death animations after that shot. I have some work yet to go on aiming but once they start shooting afxMagicMissiles, you won't be getting away. Note that in the end shot there are a flight of a dozen dragons and a squadron of eight drones dogfighting and the level is still good at around 55 fps. Still have engine work to do to improve this but given how much is visible and still unoptimized it's encouraging...




Day 9
Day 11