development 08 - Making Demo Animations
Currently doing animation tests on primary character models for the ummo demo. We organize a full set of our basic animations (run, fight, sex, flight, etc) and make them ready for insertion into the engine.
Here in the blog, I will list the various 3D Models here in reviews and explain how their various features will be utilized in the project. We are currently using a Geforce 8600 GS.
Currently in LOVE with DAZ Studio characters and models from a variety of vendors. A few of the artists we use also love DAZ. We recently bought a copy of Poser, so we will be testing that as well.
The new DAZ Studio compatibility with the Collada format is great. Blender turns out to be quite interesting indeed.We only use Vista.. let’s hope we bet correctly that it will eventually be nice…
Praying Vista does not become Windows Millenium.. They should hire us.
manchu.cat said,
May 4, 2008 at 7:01 am
What’s the ETA for the UMMO demo?
manchu.cat said,
May 18, 2008 at 6:49 pm
How’s the game coming?
pandoranyc said,
May 26, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Sorry for the delay guys. The game is still coming along but….. Ahhh i will update this in a new post instead.. hold on…
manchu.cat said,
May 30, 2008 at 2:39 am
Excellent!
manchu.cat said,
June 27, 2008 at 5:10 am
Observations from Age of Conan
1. Free for All Player versus Player:
There is a very large number of people who enjoy emotionally harming others. There are 2 Roleplaying Player v. Player servers in Age of Conan, and in both of them there are hundreds of non-roleplaying players who are on them simply to kill and irritate the characters of the roleplayers and anyone else they see. One such person posted in the forums that he did this simply because he could. He received no in-game benefit whatsoever for doing it. He simply enjoyed it and there were no consequences to his actions. I was reminded of a picture I saw of a Nazi soldier cutting off a Jewish man’s beard. He did that because he was an asshole, and because he could. I think without law enforcement or other consequences, many of these players would eventually commit acts like many Nazi soldiers. They already enjoy harming others. How many of these people would date rape if they could get away with it?
FFA PVP is completely workable. Zone instances provide a route to escape from ganking. Quickly spawning enemies provide a target rich environment. I advise against any kind of ’stealth’ class. They’re the first choice of the people I discussed above, and seriously if someone is going to turn invisible, it had better have a good explanation, like a Predator suit or magic, or something. I suggest using skills to define a character rather than arbitrary class abilities. Alot of the deliberate lowbie ganking by higher level characters could in my opinion be mitigated by not showing people’s levels by their names. That way a potential ganker would have no way of knowing if his victim would die easily or turn around and beat him to a pulp. It might inspire calmer behavior.
2. Actions and the Endurance Stat
Endurance is handled well in Age of Conan. It is used for sprinting and for doing special attack moves. In PVP I noticed that people circle strafe, jump repeatedly, and generally run all over the place. The in-game benefit is that it’s hard to hit these people. Unfortunately, believability becomes a casualty. This could be mitigated if running used a little endurance and jumping used considerable endurance. When doing the animations for UMMO, I strongly suggest watching mixed martial arts (I forget the names of the shows, but they’re like Ultimate Fighting Championships) any any armed fighting sports. People need effective stances to strike with power.
manchu cat said,
June 29, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Age of Conan Mechanics vs. Mount & Blade
I would have to say Mount & Blade is better than AoC in game mechanics. I hope UMMO uses mechanics similar to M&B.
1. Mounts are better animated and mounted combat is more robust.
2. Combat in M&B is less abstract than in AoC. If the character model is there when the weapon model or projectile model gets there, the character is hit. AoC suffers from ‘low-tech guided missile’ syndrome in which hits are abstractly calculated and you get to watch your bone tipped wooden arrow home in on your target like a teleguided cruise missile.
Very importantly, M&B doesn’t allow the Counterstrikey jumping silliness to avoid being hit. That crap is so stupid and I was pretty disappointed when I saw it in Age of Conan. People only do it because the game engine allows it to be effective.
After millions of dollars and years of development, AoC is still outdone in these important areas by a small team. *sigh*
The trouble with M&B engine mechanics is that they may not be particularly friendly to MMO applications. It takes alot of processing power to calculate the positions of all the arrows, javelins, swords, axes in the furious action on a densely populated MMO battlefield, all of which is limited by server and bandwidth capabilities. Still, there’s got to be a way.
Thoughts on armor:
Plate armor was extremely effective. Medieval European casualty records show it. It was not even that hard to move in. What physical activity a plate armored warrior could do was limited by his own strength and endurance rather than any restrictive quality of the armor.
Here’s a good article:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Salon/2385/armour.html
I personally have run for 10 miles carrying a 30lb backpack, and I was not particularly athletic at the time. Soldiers in WW1 routinely carried 100lbs of clothing, equipment, mud and water weight. The limiting factor of plate armor was its expense. People in cheaper armors like mail, leather, and layered cloth gambesons were the great majority of the casualties. A mounted armored knight killing scores of lightly armed opponents isn’t unrealistic. I strongly recommend researching the historical original source documents as well as modern experiences of reenactors to free oneself from the inaccuracies of the media so that UMMO will also be free of such inaccuracies. Also, research the nature of the injuries caused by the different types of medieval weapons. Why were such weapons developed? Why did soldiers need picks, hammers, and flails? Discover this and incorporate it into UMMO’s mechanics!
manchu cat said,
June 29, 2008 at 7:14 pm
By the Way, Where is Gor?
Why are the Gor novels by John Norman missing from the inspiration section, especially considering that feminist materials are represented? The Gor novels explore many topics relevant to UMMO, such as ancient style combat, adventure, and sexuality. Why are they not listed as inspirations for UMMO? If it’s because they’ve been deliberately excluded, what were the reasons for that decision?
manchu.cat said,
July 2, 2008 at 9:44 pm
What’s the news with UMMO? Is there another website I should be checking for news?
manchu.cat said,
July 8, 2008 at 3:42 am
Man, Myth, Magic and MMOs
Character classes in MMOs created problems and then create ever more unweildy solutions to those problems which in turn create more problems.
In AoC you have the ranger class. A ranger can turn invisible, stick people to one spot, the back up and kill them with his bow. He can track people and force them to come out of invisibility while he stays invisible. It doesn’t make sense, it’s just part of his ‘character class’. At higher levels, other classes get powers to break out of the ranger’s powers. These new powers never would have been necessary if the ranger didn’t have his powers in the first place. It seems like a waste of coding to me. At higher levels, the ranger is at a significant disadvantage in pvp and you have one class weaker than the others.
Spellcasters are the primary damage doers in AoC.
Its the usual take on magic, ie fire just shoots out of a magician’s hands, lighting falls from the sky, and so on. That’s all well and good for a poorly written fantasy novel, but if UMMO is going to be a mythology simulator its not that easy. Where does magic come from? It comes from the gods. It comes from rituals that ask favors of gods or other supernatural beings. If magic is just an elemental force that a magician taps into, then its not magic its science, and magic is really just a natural phenomenon like electricity. Gods demand worship and sacrifice. Rituals take minutes, hours or days.
Priests
It’s absurd when you see a party of priests roaming the land killing everyone in their way. What’s the point of having warriors? Why are priests deadly on the battlefield? Well, they get B-movie magical attacks like magicians and they get healing powers. You can cut them to pieces and they just keep instantaneously healing themselves. Once again this comes from the fantasy novel idea of ‘magic’ rather than a mythological perspective. The distinction between magic and folk medicine was nonexistent, and unless we’re going to get into mythological themes like throwing severed body parts into a magic cauldron and a person jumping out whole, it wasn’t instantaneous and it usually didn’t even work. In my opinion, priests in UMMO should be focused on worshipping their gods rather than on magic powers.
An AoC issue with magic users is that physical activity runs off the endurance stat and magic off the ‘mana’ stat. The result is that magic users will sprint away from a warrior merely to drain the warrior’s endurance (his combat abilities work off endurance) but leaving the magic user’s magical endurance (mana) untouched. For UMMO, if fantasy novel magic is included, physical fatigue should affect it.