So obviously I haven’t been doing a great deal of posting any posting the past couple of months. This isn’t because I haven’t wanted to. I’ve just been kind of busy.
With the release of Echoes of Faydwer a lot of my time was taken up with final polish on the horse animations. Frankly I think horses are one of the most difficult things to animate. They’re creatures that we see an awful lot of, so if there’s anything off on their animations people pick up on it fairly quickly. Humans are a similar story, of course, but as animators we tend to animate them an awful lot so we get fairly practiced with them. Real horses (as opposed to centaurs, hippogriffs, or other mythical horse-like creatures) are something that we tend to animate pretty infrequently.
Compounding the problem is that, like people, horses come in different builds and will move in different ways. A thick, heavy horse like a Clydesdale is going to move differently than a Shetland pony. Trying to find some sort of happy medium between all the variations was a bit maddening.
But enough rambling about animations. For Christmas I received a great book, Massive Multiplayer Game Development 2. Reading through it has sparked a lot of new thoughts that I want to talk about. I just hope there’s still enough of you out there to get a good dialogue going.
Glad to hear you’re alive. Production schedules can be murderous…
Interesting that you mentioned animating horses. Over the holidays, I heard a similar comment about the challenges another game (Gun, I think)had with getting the animations right. Can’t say I envy you.
Looking forward to hearing more of your ideas. I picked up that book myself. Since I’m emploed in more of a tangent to the industry, I’ll probably get more out of a second reading.