NPC Animation

[jhooks1]

Just committed changes including skinned chest pieces, beast feet, and beast tails. Beast races look pretty cool!

[jhooks1]

New Videos showing off the new animation features (hands opening/closing, tails moving, chest pieces transform)
Breton wearing robe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kESwoTdzHGI
Female Dunmer in Beshara http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k0Lfza81PQ
Khajiit in Ald-Ruhn, The Rat in The Pot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue6qvI-wN78

Obviously robes are not working properly, but they are working a lot better than before. In each video I am only animating one NPC.
Now if we could just get the fps up...

[raevol]

Amazing work jhooks1! I never cease to be amazed, every time you post these videos!

[jhooks1]

Yes!!! I finally figured out the proper way to get multiple weights working. This will fix a lot of problems with creature and NPC animation (it won't fix our performance problems though ). For one thing, robes now animate and PERFECTLY.

May post a video or two soon.

[pvdk]

Great news! Clothed people with working hands!

[jhooks1]

Alright here is the new video showing off robes again. I think it looks like 10 times better now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbwr1Fr9_7g

Performance is a lot better in this cell (2x better than Beshara). This cell is smaller and only contains 3 npcs.

[gwathlobal]

Whoa! Looks great, but the groin still seems to be nailed to the air. Is it a bug or a feature?

[jhooks1]

Made some changes so that animation information for a base_anim is only stored once. FPS went from 8fps in Beshara animating all npcs to 12fps.

[jhooks1]

I am thinking now if we can determine if an npc is on the screen we should apply animation. If it is not on the screen, the time passed should be added but we should not apply animation (no transformations). I am pretty sure this is not happening right now, and if we could get it working there would be a lot of speed up.

EDIT: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=56714 now I gotta try this out.

[jhooks1]

Tried this out, I am getting an average of 40fps now, with fps going as low as 15 in some areas of a cell and as high as 110 in others.

I think this is purely about the camera, and if there is a wall in the way, it is not seen and the npc behind a wall would be animated anyways. Not completely sure yet.

EDIT: I guess this is good for now, but ultimately we need to be able to handle 10+ npcs on the screen at once.