What year did Soul Caliber come out? How much memory did they have for Maxi and his nunchuku back then? Why can't MWM just reverse-engineer a lot of that without trying to reinvent the wheel? I'm not saying "Do this by launch." by any stretch, but I don't think it's impossible for a new power set later on.

Personally, I use MooseChucks. Really, they're just the handheld version of my Moose-O-Rang.

Radiac wrote:

How much memory did they have for Maxi and his nunchuku back then?

In what way is memory the limiting factor rather than animations development time, physics work, and a lot of boring playtesting to make sure the things don't clip through the models or do anything else stupid that will sour players on the game? (Note that there are a lot of things that could go wrong that will sour TMP on the game, pretty much anything really, and for all we know he's representative of a typical player.) This is a game with a few more body options than "pick one of 15 or so characters."

Radiac wrote:

Why can't MWM just reverse-engineer a lot of that without trying to reinvent the wheel?

I'm curious as to what process could be used to achieve this reverse engineering? Disassembling the copyrighted machine code for which they have no license? Playing the game then attempting to motion capture the movements? Something else? Honestly, reverse engineering has a crappy success rate if you're not trying to make exactly the same thing as the original.

Radiac wrote:

I'm not saying "Do this by launch." by any stretch, but I don't think it's impossible for a new power set later on.

The easy way to do nunchuks is to just weld all the chain links together and then it's just a reskinned mace. Every working chain link is, what, two to six degrees of freedom that must be modeled somehow? Sounds like a good reason to spend the effort getting ten other power sets working.

The only way that Maxi is really helpful to us is if:

a) Maxi's design code and 3D animations are easily portable into UE4,
b) Maxi's nunchucks are separable from his body,
c) Maxi's nunchucks are physics objects rather than hard-coded animation movements for very specific actions, and
d) We can buy from the makers of Soul Calibur everything we'd need to extract these physics objects and port them to our system.

Otherwise, no, we pretty much have to invent it for ourselves, I'm afraid.

Having both handles being objects is in part of the difficulty. If only one handle was physical, and the other an particle animation we could easily end up with the chuk movement pass through the arm instead of around an arm for example. In order to make things look right, things should be set up right from the outset. Also, since we are allowing weapons to be holstered, they do need to act as objects.

Doing it right takes time.

Radiac wrote:

Do you have to treat every sword, gun, staff, etc as a physics object in it's own right? Because I could see making them animate as just two cylinders (or rectangular prisms) connected by a straight line segment and to heck with the individual chain links. Add skins, make them animate as part of attacks, etc. Like the pistols in CoX. Even if you are going to treat the bars of the nunchuku as physics objects, you probably only have to worry about the one that isn't being held in hand.

About the only simplification that buys you any worthwhile reduction in dev time is in item c) Segev mentioned above: make the nunchuks hard-coded animation movements for very specific actions. And IMHO that will probably never look right.

The thing about most other objects (swords, guns, staffs, etc.) is that they're generally one-piece and rigid. This simplifies a lot of stuff (e.g. the center of gravity isn't moving around relative to the object).

Maybe some enterprising CS grad student has written a thesis on [i]Simplification of Physics of Paired Objects Linked By Short Chains,[/i] but if that's not there, they're stuck inventing something themselves.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Maybe some enterprising CS grad student has written a thesis on Simplification of Physics of Paired Objects Linked By Short Chains, but if that's not there, they're stuck inventing something themselves.

This is the point I've been trying to drive at with this. I don't think this is an impossible software problem but it is a very challenging one. It is literally possible that someone, somewhere has basically already solved how to do this but this kind of thing is so unique and specialized that the basic algorithmic solutions are just not widely known or published.

All things being equal the CoT Devs would likely still have to invent their own solution for this and frustratingly enough this is one of those kinds of things they might figure out in a week or it might take a year or more. There's really no way to easily predict how long/hard this kind of thing will really be until it's actually done.

Again I wish the CoT Devs all the best with challenges like this. Perhaps we'll be pleasantly surprised to see they actually do manage to crack this particular nut of a problem in short order.

If four not-yet-adult turtles and a rat can have numchuks, I want me some numchuks too :)

Redlynne wrote:

{okay ... ending sarcasm mode FOR REAL, this time}

lol yaright

Unfortunately, I can't think of any other weapons or power sets which could even remotely share the animations of something as specialized as Nunchaku. This weapon is very light weight and requires fast hits in order to be effective. Something like a flail couldn't use the same animation set without looking odd. A whip would use an entirely different set as well. After putting thought in to how to create the animations, there would just simply be a LOT of work for only a single functional set.

Something like a sword animation set can at least be copied over to a mace, an axe, a police baton, and effectively cover a wider variety of concepts. And this copy-paste copying is what's going to get a large portion of the game up and playable at first. Claws and spines shared numerous animations during CoH earlier days, and later on the animations of claws was altered. Mace, Broadsword, and Axe were literally all the same animation, and those animations were even used on arachnos mace attacks once again. Blast sets and control sets shared TONS of animations across the board.

Would I love to see Nunchaku? Sure. Just as I'd love to see whips and flails, and all sorts of other unique sets that have animations all their own! But that's not something I'd want prioritized for the first release of the game. Maybe a year down the line. Maybe 4 years down the line.

I like the police baton idea too, as long as it's the kind with the right-angled handle on it (like a tonfa), not the straight truncheon. Although escrima sticks would be fun too. I like all the "ninja weapons" really.

one weapon see is Scythe

[img]http://rs294.pbsrc.com/albums/mm100/picmaster_014/Knightmare%20Frames%20RP/Scythe.jpg~c200[/img]

Cyclops wrote:

I had no idea nun-chucks were so labor intensive.

Did you just not believe the multiple people telling you this, or what?