Thanks for buying Ecstasy Motion! Work is continuing on bug fixes and new features, and I just wanted to fill everybody in on some of the current topics, because it's been forever since I did a Dev Blog. Most of these changes are only in the development repo at the moment (9/24), pending final QA and bug fixes, but a quick list of last week's work would look something like:
1) FBX output (still needs to be tested in Maya & other programs, but I'm saving anims out to FBX format now, see
this thread) Adding the FBX library means more than just FBX, as well - this means we can also save out animations to Collada, as well as several other Autodesk-associated formats.
2) default.cfg automation - getting rid of the insanely complicated "default.cfg process" required to import your own model into Ecstasy. Not finished with that yet but at this point we do have a little retargeting plugin that assists you in connecting the nodes and creating your default.cfg file, and then we have a function in Ecstasy that adds its best guess as to the set of rotations necessary to convert the bvh sequences to a dsq (Torque animation file) for this model.
(This step has been a thorn in our side ever since I first wrote the BVH import resource. Turns out getting everybody into a T Pose facing the right direction and then solving for each bodypart's local rotations automatically wasn't as easy as it sounds.) :-|
3) GA system update & tutorial (because somebody asked). I realize this one is more of a "fun project" for me than a useful tool for animators right now... but it was only a day or so and somebody did ask! :-) (see
this thread.)
4) GUI revamp. I've started in on the new GUI we've been promising since EA release. At the beginning I couldn't really do this because we didn't even know what features were going to end up in the final program... and then preparation for mocap demo at SIGGRAPH took over squeakiest wheel position until that was over... and since then I've just been scrambling to hit the worst brush fires while also paying the rent - so, sorry changes on some of these things have taken so long!) But anyway, on the GUI, expect a look much more similar to the Torque World Editor (or Endorphin), with dropdown menus and icons across the top and free floating timeline, scene tree and properties/inspector windows, dockable to the sides and each other.
For 1.0 changes, the list is too long to go into full detail, but besides the above changes, we also expect to:
* port up to T3D 1.0, YAAAAAYY!!!
This should
dramatically increase performance (the 1.0 demo about doubled framerate on my machine, over the older beta versions) and fix a number of annoying little GUI bugs, and I'm sure other things I haven't even noticed yet.
* do another pass on the main physics set up for the ACK characters, and most importantly
expose the datablocks through T3D's new datablock editor, so they are much easier for the final user (non-scripter) to make modifications. But yes, the Ecstasy ragdoll physics are still a little twitchy, I apologize. Other possibilities for improvement include: a) adding back in the functionality of simply freezing prone instead of getting up, when movement drops below the Sleep Threshold, so they don't have to sit there and vibrate, b) plugging in Bullet as well as PhysX for the underlying physics, to see if we can get better joint performance - my system has physics engine abstracted out pretty well so it shouldn't be that huge of a job.
* take another pass on Playbots (multiple actor scene management) to make it much easier to add bots of different types to a scene and tell them what to do.
* improved support for physics event and motor force scripting through the regular GUI, so you can easily tell the actors when and where and how hard to get hit, and what other actions you want them to do, either on a global scene timeline or relative to a specific animation.
* camera control - make orbit-style camera around the selected character rather than having to run around as a game character (again,
sorry, moving as fast as we can here!)
The list could go on, but I think this is most of what we have planned. (Don't hold me to it, there are probably things I'm forgetting right now - if you don't see your core feature on the list, reply here!) Also targeting Mac and Linux releases, but probably slightly post-1.0 release for Windows, not before.
Cheers, and happy devving!
Chris Calef
Ecstasy Lead Dev
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