Customizable stature?

[Monocle]

Will you be able fatter and skinnier or taller and shorter like in Phantasy Star Online? If so, this game will instantly be deemed sweet.
hmmm, maybe this should be in this wishlist section
:baby:   :baby:  :baby:  :baby:  :baby:  :baby:

[kyalin]

Well u cant yet obviously, but yea, theres some threads on customizing looks, and i believe they were going to try and have it so u can costomize ur looks to a very large degree.

[Link]

The game is sweet wether you like it or not, and not because of the way it looks, because there are people that are giving their time and brains to develop it for totally nothing in return, even if they are only giving a very small fraction of their time.

[boonet]

uhm... the ability of having different body sizes is feasible in 2 ways:
1) the one I guess you wouldn\'t like because would create huge download files and would be not absolutely flexible (just a fixed amount of body sizes). This could be implemented right now. No new tools needed.
2) the smart way, which comprises blend deformers on the mesh and vertex shaders: smaller downloadables and huge number of possible body shapes available. Needs modern video cards unfortunately

The possibility of customizing your skin is a different question, and it is already coded; and the ability of wearing armor/clothes that effectively modify your appearance will be added ASAP.

[Monocle]

i wouldn\'t mind number 1, since i do have cable modem . I\'m sure there are people who don\'t though, and they wouldn\'t like this.
I just want to make my guy fat!!!!!! 8o   :baby:

BTW: I know this game is sweet Link, and we owe these people a lot for their selfless work.  It was a comment that meant: this game will be rated 10 crabs instead of 9 and 1/2 with this feature

And would a Radeon 8500 LE be modern enough for number 2???

[Voldengrath]

Sounds good. but what do i know

[Vengeance]

Boonet,

Could we do this without vertex shaders if we:

a) Use skeletal anims
b) Do a hard-transform type thing at the time the character is loaded on his rigging so the overhead is only done one time and he gets his own copy of the sprite?

That might trade RAM for performance and modernity of gfx card...

- V

[Monocle]

wow, these admins are sweet.  I can\'t believe they actually read and respond to what you say!?!?!

Quite bamboozling 8o

[ParaSite]

Lol, you\'re  right, but their replies sometimes are gibberish  

b) Do a hard-transform type thing at the time the character is loaded on his rigging so the overhead is only done one time and he gets his own copy of the sprite?

uhhh

[Jessyn]

wow, it\'s like it\'s all in greek, except the scary part is, i sorta understand the greek.  HELP! I\'m turning into a hard core programmer!

Jessyn

If you don\'t GOSUB a program loop, you\'ll never get a subroutine....

[boonet]

Venge:

yes, the thing I forgot to mention is that my point 2 is subordinated to the use of skeletal animation. The useage of vertex shaders is necessary to speed up the computing of blend shapes, which are driven a) by character customization b) by skeleton joints animations.
a) means that we can customize the character stature and other physical traits that need to be on the model without providing different models.
b) means that the movement of a skeleton joint drives a blend deformer that creates nicer mesh deformations in the areas around the joint itself.
All this can be computed at runtime by the cpu, but why not to send all this load to the gpu, since it is there for this purpose?
You have seen already in practice what a blend shapes-driven animation means, since i.e. the kran and the female enkidukai use it now to deform in a more natural way when animated. The problem is that now we have all those nice deformations baked into a \'hard\' vertex animation file, which can\'t be easily changed if needed, and which totally prevents the introduction of different body sizes, unless you create a new model+animation for each new body size.

[Vengeance]

I was trying to come up with alternative to requiring modern cards.  In effect, \"baking\" the vertices one time in software instead of per frame in hardware.  Just a thought...

[Cyonamie]

Making tons of models to download is too time consuming and impractical to work.  Sure its possible considering that 3d files are quite small, but wouldn\'t that, in theory, make you do new animations for each and every model?  Maybe I\'m just working with outdated software...

[Monocle]

I know nothing about about progamming, so don\'t be too hard, but in Phantasy star online you just kind of strecthed your own  model to make it tall, short, fat or skinny.  Their were infinite degrees of stature in that way so i never saw anyone that looked like my char and tons of different models weren\'t necessary.  

-just a thought

[boonet]

In effect, \"baking\" the vertices one time in software instead of per frame in hardware

Surely possible. Seems a bit a memory eater...

Sure its possible considering that 3d files are quite small

With vertex animation, they end up being quite big... you can easily have a few MB used by a specific body size character with animations.
Skeletal animation avoids this problem

in Phantasy star online you just kind of strecthed your own model to make it tall, short, fat or skinny

This is exactly what I mean with blend shapes: they are the technology used to have this kind of feature. They can be done in software (this is the way 3D softwares handled them till now), or in hardware, now that modern programmable cards allow vertex shaders.

make you do new animations for each and every model

Not necessarily: you must export different animations for different body sizes, but in the animation software you can still do only one animation valid for every case.
The problem is always the same, besides filesize: you can only have discretized body sizes (i.e. fat, normal, skinny), since you can\'t interpolate between them. The interpolation is done through blend shapes.