Plot NPCs

Post by **MamiyaOtaru** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 2:41 am

plot NPC checklist:

All the animations for the main campaign plot NPCs are in.

Faction relations for them are set.

Sound is done.

comms.xml done

Plot needs to be tested

scheherazade · Post by **scheherazade** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 4:13 am

you mean talking animations?

-scheherazade

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 5:48 am

Anonymous wrote:you mean talking animations?

-scheherazade

He's... ALIVE!

Post by **MamiyaOtaru** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 7:52 am

Yeah, the comms animations. Turns out each of them has only 4 different frames.. You can repeat them of course

So all the plot NPCs have their 4 frames captured and arranged in a reasonable facsimile of speaking, and sounds to go with it. And they are in the plot, so Riordian looks and sounds like himself, Toth, Miggs, etc.

JKeefe · Post by **JKeefe** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 4:55 pm

MamiyaOtaru wrote:Turns out each of them has only 4 different frames.

Ah, early 90s technology...

scheherazade · Post by **scheherazade** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 1:28 am

so are you making them jabber about like a bad dub?

maybe there is a way to have a sequence. like :

still = frame 1
talking = loop (frames 2, 3, 4)

tehn have some volume metric, where if the sound for speech is above some threshold, it goes to the talking loop.

?

-scheherazade

Post by **hurleybird** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 1:46 am

Humm, Jdoom has this feature that "smoothes out" the animation of textures by creating and adding in-between frames. Not sure how much work a feature like that would require though, especially since it would likely be of very little use to vegastrike.

Post by **MamiyaOtaru** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 7:08 am

Anonymous wrote:so are you making them jabber about like a bad dub?

No no, not like a bad dub, like a comm link with very low bandwidth

But yeah, that's what they (and the generic talking heads already in there) do. Short of some routine to transform wav data into lip movements like Half Lief 2 has, that's about all that's possible.

JKeefe · Post by **JKeefe** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 10:40 pm

I remember thinking when Privateer came out, "If only we could have animated faces with upwards of 40 simulated muslces each, this game would rock."

morki · Post by **morki** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 11:52 pm

Hello, why do all women look like men?
Tayla, Lynn, ... very masculine look

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 12:38 am

Hey, I get drag queen bashed too from time to time

Maybe because we spaceloving girls DO look like guys... eep....

morki · Post by **morki** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 2:19 am

, that's a joke!?
The face in the dialoge-screen is appealing, but the bar-screen ... they drink like alcohol addicts and have the look of Miggs

ricree101 · Post by **ricree101** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 4:47 am

morki wrote:, that's a joke!?
The face in the dialoge-screen is appealing, but the bar-screen ... they drink like alcohol addicts and have the look of Miggs

Well, that's what happens when they refuse to ever meet you anywhere besides bars.

And speaking of bars, remind me never to go to school in oxford. I'm just not that interested in a place with bounty hunters hanging out in the campus bars.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 7:05 am

scheherazade wrote:so are you making them jabber about like a bad dub?
maybe there is a way to have a sequence. like :
still = frame 1
talking = loop (frames 2, 3, 4)
tehn have some volume metric, where if the sound for speech is above some threshold, it goes to the talking loop.

There was an article in Game Developer, a couple of years ago or so, about lipsynching, by someone who made a package for it. Unfortunately, I think it was a commercial package. But there might be something open source out there by the time it gets around to getting really fancy about things.

There's also an open source package for real time face modeling that in fact models a large number of face muscles individually. I downloaded a demo years ago and it didn't seem to work, but that was long ago. Might be something to dig up if we ever think we'll have 3D bases and faces.

Post by **MamiyaOtaru** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 9:43 am

As long as we're on the subject of plot NPCs, here's a public reminder to myself to redo Hunter Toth's voice files, they got lost in an SVN mixup.

warzog · Post by **warzog** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 1:56 pm

chuck_starchaser wrote:There was an article in Game Developer, a couple of years ago or so, about lipsynching, by someone who made a package for it. Unfortunately, I think it was a commercial package. But there might be something open source out there by the time it gets around to getting really fancy about things.

There's also an open source package for real time face modeling that in fact models a large number of face muscles individually. I downloaded a demo years ago and it didn't seem to work, but that was long ago. Might be something to dig up if we ever think we'll have 3D bases and faces.

I've got both of those programs.
The Lip Sync program is called MiMic, by www.LIPSInc.com
The modeling program is called Poser. I have Poser 4, but they already have Poser 5 out.
Poser 5 will allow Shrek-like Graphics, Poser 4 is close, but the clothes aren't as fluid.

Here's a banner I did for a website, using Poser 4, sorry 'bout the logo.
(But you get the idea.)
I tried uploading a clean image here, but this site has a 10mb limit.