External Animation Update (Patreon)

We have been pretty quiet here these past few weeks, but we have a lot to share and posts to come!

For the Attachment Update we have decided to rework the external animations, i.e. the full-player animations of your teammate next to you. All existing external animations have been revamped and given lean left and lean right variations, and there are also new animations for jumping, swimming and falling.

There are now 120 external animations total and we created a new, smoother animation system to handle blending between them all. The image below shows which animations are blended together in which order to produce the final result.

Since Patreon shrinks the image, you can view the full resolution here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rf65sphrk5equ1/extAnimBlending.png?dl=0

For example, a player is crouch strafing looking up at a 45 degree angle and transitions to running. The game then blends the required crouching leaning and lookup/down animation variants with the standing leaning and lookup/down animation variants based on how far the player is through the stand-up process. Then this amalgamation of blended animations is blended into the running animation based on the speed of the player, to produce the final result.

Animation Queues

The final animation result is then stored in both the Upper Body Animation Queue and Lower Body Animation Queue. We use two queues so that while the player is reloading (upper body animation) the legs can still continue running smoothly.

Animations in the queue are processed in a first-in-first-out order. For example when changing from the Assault Rifle to the Plasma Pistol the upper body queue looks like this:

- Blend Assault Running with Holster
- Remove Assault Running when blending has finished
- Play Holster for a bit
- Blend Holster into Plasma Pistol Running
- Remove Holster when blending has finished
- Play Plasma Pistol Running on loop

There are also new animations for jumping, strafing, diagonal walking (holding W and A/D), falling, sliding and swimming. Patreon only allows me to embed one video per post so you will have to click on these links:

https://youtu.be/E-WaoGLvWG8 

https://youtu.be/NoLatPsPoSg 

Progressions Sneak Peek

We have also started on the new progression system reward and design. Here's a sneak peek!