Sure. Player character? No.
Only in 3D. In 2D, you slap some pixels on top and there’s your scarf:
I tend to find it’s the other way around. Once you’ve got a scarf modelled and rigged, it’ll work* for all animations, but for animated 2D sprites you have a lot more things to do.
* May have visual artifacts like clipping
and add a couple of frames to the sprite sheet in order to animate the scarf if that’s required.
Alt text: In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they’d have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we’re still working on it.
I love how this is actually an example of progress. These days, ML can be used for this kinda thing and it’s not too bad at it even.
Player? Easy. Scarf? Easy. Wearing a scarf? That depends on a lot of factors such as which part of the body, how the models were made and rigged, etc.
And if it like blows in the wind that’s a whole jigglebone system and wind simulation that’s a lot of stuff going on
Tbf, you can make the characters wear anything, but it won’t look good. Lol
Welcome to second life
There’s already a codebase for bursting from the ground in an explosion of lava. Everyone wants that.
You’re the first person asking for a scarf, and our system doesn’t even know what a neck is.
Time for the old NPC-with-a-train-for-a-hat trick.
“I noticed the elves in level 3 look too similar to the dwarves in level 5.”
“It’s too late to change it now!”
I want dresses, and I don’t care if they clip through literally everything!
My bg3 character is female. She was in slacks until act 3 where she could finally have a dress
We looted everything. I feel like there are two dresses in the game: the robe Gale wears and a white dress you find in a Balders Gate house near the end of the game
Way back in the 90s I did a contract job at MS Research on a project called “V-Worlds” - a world simulator similar to the Doom or Quake engine, but it was browser-based and everything was a script, so changing how the world worked didn’t mean you had to restart a server, just change the scripts and new stuff would appear right in front of you.
Anyway the concept of adding accessories to the player’s avatar and even having a pet follow you around came up, and I remember there was an involved discussion of how difficult/impossible that would be. The player’s avatar was a special object class that represented a user, and didn’t have the same capabilities as ordinary objects in the world. I remember asking, “Why isn’t the avatar just a world object the player happens to control? Then you could do all kinds of cool stuff like let the player transform into something else just by switching objects, or let another player run your character.” Dead silence. I was just a contractor, what did I know?
This feels like the kinda project that should have a 1hr YouTube indie doc about it
I wouldn’t mind seeing that! After V-Worlds was declared “completed” MSR tried to find a product group to fold it into, but nobody wanted to own it. I don’t remember if XBox existed then, but the code just sat there for a few years, then I heard they opensourced it. When my kids were playing ToonTown I found a bug that let you slide behind the background and move around, like you could see that a clerk behind a counter was just a legless floating torso. The method of getting there seemed to be exactly like a V-Worlds bug, so I wondered if Disney might have been using the code. But it could have just been a common graphics bug, I dunno.
I remember finding another bug while creating a demo with a snaky sea creature swimming around. To animate a multi-segmented object you had to animate each segment separately. After the animation ran for a minute or two, enough unrelated interrupts would happen in the computer that would throw the body parts out of sync, making body parts either merge into each other or move apart, and the whole thing would look like crap. Same thing if you had somebody ride in a car or on a train - the car and character were animated separately and you’d end up with the character floating along behind the car.
I asked the dev about making the animation itself an abstract object whose position would be moved around, and attaching in-world objects to it, with position offsets. Each animation step would be computed just once instead of for each body part, and all the parts would be rendered with offsets from that one position, guaranteeing them to stay in sync visually. He said yeah that’s a good idea, but we’re not working on that code anymore. Oh well.
Another bug involved moving from room to room. The engine only loaded graphics for the current room, so when you went through a doorway it would load the new room and dump the previous one, causing a very unnatural visual delay that looked like a glitch in the matrix. The way we coped with this was by putting an entire world in a single room, so all the graphics were loaded all at once. But this not only limited the world size, it meant we had to create our own version of the room system in script. To keep track of where players and objects were, we put invisible barriers in doorways and used event handlers when things passed through them. Then we had to use this to enforce which players could talk to each other or hear sounds made in a given “room”.
I suggested loading a cluster of rooms at once - the current one and those that were one connection away. Then when an avatar passed into a new room its graphics would already be there, no glitch, and the graphics for other rooms could be loaded and unloaded in the background. Again, nice idea but we’re done working on that code. Sigh. I really wish I had joined that project about 6 months sooner. Not like I’m a genius or anything but these seemed like really fundamental things that should have been addressed up front.
Okay, rant over. I haven’t thought about this stuff in quite a while - I’m kind of amazed so many details are in my head. I must have agonized over it a lot at the time lol.
Shadows in the real world a lack of energy Shadows in games imma need it all boss
And don’t even get them started on doors.
Game director : we’re gonna add interact-able doors with proper door opening animations for the characters
The game designers:
The programmers and artists:
The producers:
Legend of Zelda did it well.
Honestly, I think a major issue with doors is that they just slow down gameplay.
It’s like coming across a ladder only every building has one.
Granted. All door animations are now forced cutscenes.
FROM Software: Fuck that, we’re doing fog-walls.
Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:
- Doors violently push anyone out of the way, possibly “crushing” them into walls or
- Force themselves back closed, turning any random NPC / obstacle on the other side into an unbeatable lock or
- Just trap an unfortunate NPC in a corner on the other side, or
- If they use the physics system to swing open, in which case they’ll look smooth but possibly bonk the player/actor going through them a few times and could potentially (and comically) insta-kill them if physics is feeling grumpy.
The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.
Gamedev is magical.
Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.
The ability to “slowly quietly open”, and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.
Have you ever played ATV Offroad Fury on the PS2? When you reached the edge of the map, it would just fling you back towards the center.
I propose that is how we deal with NPCs blocking doors. With negated fall damage, of course
Wow, memory unlocked! Motocross Madness did this too, if you managed to drive up the giant wall surrounding the world. I checked, and it turns out both these games were developed by the same company, Rainbow Studios, so probably they used the same engine.
PM: You know real world?
Make it like that
Okay, okay. No doors but stairs instead
what if you wanted a scarf, but god said
Traceback (most recent call last): File "you.py", line 1, in <module> scarf() NameError: name 'scarf' is not definedYahweh would use light mode 🙄
God being Python
The scarf in Shinobi was such a revelation when it came out
I just want a game that lets my avatar be left handed.
changes all weapons to be two-handed
This way, no one will complain and there’s only one thing to maintain!
You can hold a two handed weapon favoring the left, or the right.
😵
You’ll just hold it right at the center of your screen. You’ll not see anything, but it’ll work!
You’ll just hold it
rightleft at the centerFTFY
hahaha
Counter strike
Hahah
No.
Could I at least get some left handed emoji?
We’ll see with the investors
Counterstrike did that like 23 years ago. Yikes I’m old
They just mirror the viewmodel
As a gameplay programmer, I got anxiety from reading this (and I think the animators are already in a fetal position on the floor)
Would it be possible to just mirror what the player is seeing so literally everything is backwards? Like a visual effect ‘in-post’? Obviously that would mess with any printed text but other than I cant think of big issue?
That’s basically what they did for Legend of Zelda:Twilight princess. GameCube version Link was left handed, Wii version he was right handed. Looking at game guide sites was kind of comical. They basically said we’re not rewriting our guide for Wii…just flip the directions. If the guide says go left…go right for Wii.
You could even do that on the player’s model specifically. But it’s still a maybe, you’re almost guaranteed to get some cursed bugs due to every preexisting code having been made with right handedness in mind.
I’m sure animators are internally screaming at the reasons why this will make some originally right handed animations look off but that’s not my area of expertise.
In reality it’s probably not the hardest thing to do gameplay-wise, especially if you’re doing it from the very beginning of the project, but I don’t think you can simply mirror animations (and some animations-related logic) and have it look natural, so you’d have to make dedicated animations and possibly logic for left hand strikes, right hand blocks etc. which would obviously be much more expensive. But yeah that’s probably what Minecraft does now for example, and since they have a very low level of detail on player characters and their animations it looks alright.
Can’t you just swap x for -x. Run some unit tests just in case. We’ll push to prod next Wednesday. Sound good? Got to dash, strategy meeting started 5 minutes ago. Seeyoubye.
As a programmer, I’ve learned to cringe at any suggestion from someone that starts with “can’t you just”. Cause I guarantee you, I can’t “just” do that. It’s way more complicated than just.
😬 I am familiar with the PTSD trigger words.
You little shit xD
Ok, but all your dialogue will be spoken backwards.
Noted. I’ll talk to Jeff in FX and get all the .wav files reversed. Shouldn’t add too much to storage. I wonder if lip sync will be affected? I’ll mention it to Sue when she gets back next week.
That makes sense. All left handed people are witches anyways, they’ll feel right at home
dies
The location that the player is visually interacting with would be different, but the world wouldn’t know that. Eg. in a cutscene, the player reaches out and touches a button on a control panel. If the player’s X is flipped, their left hand will be further left than their right hand, and will miss the button visually as they go to press it. Asymmetrical animations might also be fucked, ie. sidestep/jump right normally extends the left leg for leverage, but now their right leg would push off visually and they would still move right.
I don’t want you to come to me with problems. I want you to come with solutions. I’m going to schedule some action orientated soft skills training for you next month. There is a push to increase our education KPIs so budget is available.
Not sure whether to upvote because this is so accurate it’s funny or to downvote because it’s infuriating 😂
Ow that one hits me right in the briefcase
minecraft allows left-handedness ever since they added the off-hand mechanic
