Re: PES2010 News & Rumours thread
I've worked several times adding mocap data to rigged models, and having these models prepared to certain variables of movement. Nothing as complicated as it is in a football game like PES or FIFA, of course, where it has to interact with the physics engine and the collision detection and you have to take into account a lot more variables or even integrate the data to procedural animation processes or inverted kinetics.
And I can tell you adding the ammount of animations they seem to be adding (we're talking about 100 animations to say something) is very time consuming because you have to test and refine them and that means a lot of time generally to make sure thngs work as expected.
It's not a simple copy / paste. So I think adding all the animations, testing them and refining will take them a LOT of the time they have left and they will need to streamline the process.
So it's not a matter of days, nuts! It's a matter of months, I think they will spend 2 months on implementing animations and it's not that much time to do it. But it all depends on HOW are they implementing animations and at which level they let the animation take some variations or procedurally blend to another animation.
Regarding the physics engine and collision, the underlying system in place would still take care of this even with new animations added. The ball and world doesn't really react to the animation but more to the position/rotation of the collision mesh/boxes which follow the position/rotation of the bones in the animation.
Obviously if they had 100's to add then it depends what they needed to do to add them in but i don't think they are going to change all of them, possibly concentrate on the ones that have most influence and that are seen most ie movement.
Changing a set of animations could still take days/weeks imho but it this actually depends on many things ie no. of people doing the work, how many hours a day etc.
With inverted kinetics, heads following the ball, looking at other players etc, this should already be a part of the engine and would affect the animations playing on top without the animation having any influence on it.
So even with new animations, this wouldn't be affected other than some tweaking needed.
I also think that PES hasn't started using many advanced techniques regarding interactions and collisions and probably still has most from what worked on ps2.
I've worked on many 3d games/systems and im sure i know some of what is required. I did some work on a 3d action game which had interactions with the environments, other characters and IK/animations.
Also created some crowd tests where 100 of characters moved around avoiding/bumping into each other etc and reacting based on 100's of different factors ie walk/run speed, collision points, weight, if one entity was already involved in a collision ie falling back how it would react with another enity running into it. This all involved physics, IK and some procedural animations.
Obviously you understand what your talking about Drekkard, and I understand the complexity of things too. However, games companies plan things out, if Konami planned on alot of new animations for this release, they know what is required and will have planned ahead with what is needed to implement it.
ps Im not a know-it-all and could be totally wrong, the thing with game dev is that everyone has their own ways, ideas and solutions.
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