[Bf-committers] GSoC 2011 Proposal: BGE Animation Improvements

[Dalai Felinto]

Hello Mitchell, it's feedback time

Bone Constraints:
------------------------
Recently I went over all the Bone Constraints to see which are and
which are not supported in the BGE. You can find the list here [1]
(volunteers to copy this list to the wiki?). The think I noticed is
that most of them are supported in the BGE, although their use is only
for posing purposes. In other words, you can't change their Influence
or their Bone Target. Since we already have an "Armature Actuator"
(made for iTaSC) it would be nice to expand it to support other Bone
Constraints.

dLoc, dRot, dScale:
--------------------------
In the good old 2.49 a lot of flexibility comes from the delta
transformations. We don't have a way to set them from the UI anymore
(although they are still supported). But frankly, I don't think we
should. I would rather see the "Add" option currently available for
Pose Actions and Shape Actions used as a replacement for the old delta
behaviour.

Shape Keys:
-----------------
>>"I think shape keys are currently broken in the BGE"
Right now ShapeKeys are working, but only the current/active one [2].
The other bug I'm aware of is the lack of bone drivers support in the
game engine [3]. I'm also not so sure the option to pick the relative
shape is working.

What I was wondering is if instead of only playing a predefined action
curve we could directly affect the influence of the current shapes of
a Mesh. Nevermind, I just realized we can have this by animating a
single Shape in an action and control it in the BGE. Assuming we can
have multiple shapekey actions running on top of each other we are
good to go.

Overall:
----------
I like the proposal, and definitively like the fact that this will
give more control to the script interface to handle all the
animations. It doesn't address the performance aspect of the
animation, but the feature aspect of it. I guess this is fine.
Codewise my one big suggestion is to make the new code as much
independent of the Blender animation code as possible. The fact that
we share a lot of code with Blender brings nice things such as the
support of the bone constraints for free, and the exactly same
behaviour form Blender and the BGE. This comes with a price though,
both in performance and in code management. It would be something I
would love to see address in the future, but this is a separated topic
involving some polemic ideas of bringing in external animation
libraries [4] and completely decoupling Blender and BGE animation code
:)

Links:
--------
[1] - http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&aid=26804&group_id=9&atid=498
[2] - http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&aid=25991&group_id=9&atid=306
[3] - http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=22874&group_id=9&atid=306
[4]  - http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/source/browse/branches/AnimKit/Dependencies/Source/GameKit/AnimKit/


It would be nice to get some feedback from animators and devs working
with other engines too.
Best regards,
Dalai

--
www.dalaifelinto.com
@dfelinto

2011/4/5 Mitchell Stokes <mogurijin at gmail.com>:
> I've created a proposal for better BGE animations and submitted my
> application/proposal to Melange. Here is my proposal on the wiki:
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Moguri/GSoC2011_BGE_Animation_Improvements
>
> Feedback is welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> Mitchell Stokes
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