Jak has indicated that the next release may contain some stuff related to animations - specifically, a pose/animation editor - so I thought it was time to jot down my thoughts on that subject.
I know from my time as a programmer that users frequently have seriously crazy ideas about what's easy and what's hard, so I'm going to start off at "obvious" and rapidly transit out to "what is that guy smoking?". I may lose touch with reality at some point, but hopefully if I throw a whole bunch of stuff in here, some of it might stick.
Let's load the idea-shotgun, shout "pull", and start with the one-that-probably-cannot-be-done:
Inverse Kinematics. It'd be really cool, and probably make it possible to tweak characters a lot more (at present, any significant changes to body proportions, like making legs longer/shorter in relation to the body, tends to wreck the animations).
When specifying animations, it would be really useful to define positions of body parts relative to other (characters') body parts - e.g. "this guy's hand should be
here relative to her ankle". (or is this just asking for inverse kinematics again?)
I presume any pose/animation editor would have some degree of tweening going on, based on key frames? Otherwise we'd go insane trying to do anything mobile at all.
Next, an anti-suggestion: Having played about with Garry's Mod a bit, I found ragdoll posing in that "game" to be a monumental pain in the ass. While I have no real objection to the idea of dragging limbs around using some sort of FPS-style manipulator, the GM implementation just made it almost impossible to position anything with any accuracy at all. So: don't do it like that, please.
Participants: At present, SS only allows two permutations: MF and FF. It would be nice if the animation editor could go beyond those combinations. Personally, I'm most interested in solo female, but I feel solo male and male-male should be in there. No doubt others will want threesomes and upwards, too.
It would be really useful to have various preset positions, both whole-body and part-body. For example, standing, sitting, kneeling, hands & knees for full-body, and various facial expressions. Something garry's mod (rather, the Source Engine's facial animation system) got right was the face posing system, where there were half-a-dozen "expression" sliders (happy, sad, surprised) plus more sliders corresponding to individual "muscles" - you could then intermix them as you liked. Kinda like the SS character editor, in fact. Who'da thunk it?
Similarly, it would be useful to be able to remix existing animations (even if only other user-made ones) - either to simply alter them, or to be able to chain them together.
I think that's it for the pose/animation editor specifically. But I have some more suggestions, which start nearby (as in: still somewhat animation related) but scoot off in a different direction.
How about some sort of "sequencer" - a means to specify a chain of animations to be played in a particular order, with particular duration. So: "kissing B for 10 seconds, blowjob A for 15 seconds, then missionary C for 20 seconds..." If it can specify the "performers" and costumes too, then presto! we've got a machinima porn movie construction kit. Maybe camera controls included, but override-able by the viewer?
Save the whole caboodle (let's call it a "script") to a simple file format (e.g. XML) and I might even be able to come up with a ppp-alike to auto-generate them (no promises).
Next up, if anyone hasn't heard of
Konashion's Super Deepthroat, I recommend you go and investigate. I'll wait.
Got that? Right, at this point I want to draw attention to one feature in particular: the moddable dialogue system (if you didn't spot it, you need to turn it on in one of the option screens). Essentially, the game has a text-based speech system. At intervals, based on certain in-game triggers (e.g. the guy just came in her mouth, or particularly vigorous... uh... activity) the game "plays" a line of text in a speech bubble. The lines of text are provided in a formatted plain text file (see the modding page) which makes creating custom dialogue a piece of cake.
With a couple of minor tweaks (some means of highlighting which character is speaking, for example - Konashion is currently working on that) this strikes me as an excellent way of adding "personality" to the characters, especially if the character XML file specifies what dialogue they use. A switch to turn it off might be good.
Now: back to the sequencer: if the "script" can supress the regular dialogue, and supply its own dialogue to be displayed at certain points, then the machinima porn can have an actual script, in the conventional movie sense - albeit subtitled rather than audio. Actually, how about "and play this sound file now"...
OK, that's about 80 miles off into the wilderness, time to stop.
Topic: Animation suggestions, and more... (Read 10988 times)