Character Animation with Direct3D- P22:This book is primarily aimed at teaching indie and hobby game developers how to create character animation with Direct3D. Also, the seasoned professional game developer may find some interesting things in this book. You will need a solid understanding of the C++ programming language as well as general object-oriented programming skills. | 406 Character Animation with Direct3D FIGURE Copyright 2009 Remedy Entertainment. Q How is the player movement hooked into the animation system Walk us through what happens when the player presses the thumbstick on the gamepad. A It starts by the joypad giving a value between and to the animation system telling how much the user has pressed the stick. The system then decides if the input is big enough for us to issue a run animation or to do a walk animation. If it is a walk animation we scale the speed of the animation depending on how much the player is pressing the thumbstick. If the character is standing still we play a transition animation before we enter the actual walk or run cycle. The velocity of the character is embedded into the animation. We use this approach because we want to avoid having the feet sliding against the ground. The velocity is then fed into the physics engine which moves the character capsule for us. There is a lot of smoothing and clamping going on in the evaluation of the joypad real humans can t turn 180 degrees in one frame so we need to emulate some of this behavior into the input logic. Q What has been the biggest challenge with making Alan Wake move A The hardest thing is to find a good balance between visuals and responsiveness. When real humans move they tend to prepare for their actions beforehand. For example before we jump we squat a little bit to get some momentum before doing the actual jump. In a game on the other hand we want the character to jump immediately when the player presses the jump button. As you can see it is impossible lease purchase PDF Split-Merge on to remove this watermark. Chapter 16 Putting It All Together 407 to predict what the player will be doing next. If we want characters that look natural we need to introduce a little bit delay to all the actions. Tuning this delay to get a good compromise between visuals and responsiveness is a delicate task. Assassin s Creed is game
