Ecstasy Motion has been flying under the radar for the last month, but not because we weren't doing anything! Now we're back up and online with an all new GUI, better BVH output, and iClone support! If you've been waiting for the right time to try it, that time would be now!
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So, it's been a while since I've had anything to say here - the time finally came to address the issue of our GUI (the infamous Ecstasy "Wall of Buttons", which was only meant to get us through the first release) and coincidentally in the middle of that project I decided it was also high time to get beyond the T3D Beta 2 release I was building on, and port up to 1.0!
Sounds like a nice little job for an afternoon... ha ha. However, weeks later, the new version is WORKING, and we're very proud to announce that it's already up in the client repo and ready to go!
(If the site cuts off the right side of this image for you, just right click on it and go "view image" to see the whole thing.)
As you'll note, we no longer have every possible function in the program on screen at the same time. We're still arranging a few things here and there, and of course we'll be taking an art pass before we call it done, but this revision represents a HUGE step toward where we want to end up at for our 1.0 release. All the different windows have separate controls to turn them on or off, and can be placed wherever you want them onscreen. The Scene Tree window in the upper left shows you all your actors and all of their sequences, etc., and when you click on anything in there it updates the Properties window with any relevant data on that subject. The Tools window contains all of the BVH conversion tools, animation editing, physics keyframe and render options. And the last window in the bottom right, currently our "extras" bin for things that don't have a long term home yet, is actually the "AI" window, for managing your state engine, GA, and NavMesh controls when we have that stuff implemented.
All in all, we're pretty pleased with how it's coming out, and hope you will be too!
If you are already an Ecstasy Motion owner, all you have to do is open your launcher, hit Update Application, and watch the files download. EXCEPT: once you've updated, you also need to hit the "DeletePrefs.bat" and "DeleteDSOs.bat" batch files in your "app" directory, or you will achieve unsatisfactory results. Also, if you have done any scripting of your own, you will want to make copies of everything you've touched before you hit Update - I've moved some things around to make sure we never tromp on your script changes again, but this one update might mess up your work, so please back it up!
In addition to the new interface, we've also identified and fixed a lot of bugs and rewritten some core parts of the program - most importantly the BVH output. It turns out there were still a couple of misconceptions written into the process, but after a hard weekend of 4x4 matrix math, I'm pretty confident that it's finally nailed. We can now save out BVH files that
exactly match the truebones format, and should be able to tackle any other flavor of BVH that comes along.
That little code review was actually inspired by some exciting conversations we've been having with Reallusion, the makers of iClone, regarding how our two programs can work together. Here's a quick example of some fairly effective collaboration:
Import from Ecstasy into iClone is done using the Standard (Truebones) BVH output format, in conjunction with a truebones.prf iClone profile I wrote. This part is still not completely perfect (the feet get a little weird sometimes) but we're actively involved in fixing the last problems there. Our output to Poser seems to be looking a lot better now after the rewrite as well, and we're looking forward to getting more feedback from the Max (biped) community as well.
We've also included a little eye candy with this release - the "Dojo" mission that we used for our SIGGRAPH demo is included right now, and we will be adding a few more shiny levels. This is just to give people a feel for what we can do in terms of rendering machinima movies right in Ecstasy, as opposed to saving the BVHs out and going to another program.
There are still some bugs and glitches, of course, and we are by no means feature-complete, but we are still on track for a 1.0 release in December (let's just call it the end of the year for now.) If you've been thinking about jumping on board, now would be a great time! You can still grab it for the Early Adopter price, and you'll already be a full member when the final release comes out!
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