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Cryptic Studios Open Sources Animation Tools
GameDev.net reports that Cryptic Studios (makers of the Massive title City of Heroes) has released a powerful animation tool under the GPL. Called CrypticAR, for Cryptic Animation Rig, the software will allow animators to bring 3d models to life via a toolkit of scripts and rigs. "'Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL,' said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. 'We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR.'"
Besides the Second life client, CoH has pretty much the most bloated of all the MMO clients. It even runs slow on most of my buddies high end machines. I wonder how useful the released dev software will be, when there are planty of open source options already available (blender)?
Hopefully their source code isnt cryptic...
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Are they going to be receptive to patches integrating into blender or getting it running on *nix?
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"Cryptic's "AR" (animation rig) is a free download (Gnu GPL) from their website. It is a set of scripts, rigs and models for 3D Studio MAX that Cryptic uses in their own development pipeline."
3D max might be.
Maybe now that it's open sourced it can be ported cross platform and have support for more formats added (FBX and Collada would be a nice place to start)
I just took a quick look, it requires 3D Studio Max and only runs on windows.
If anyone from the Blender team reads this, how realistic would it be to incorporate this stuff into Blender? Or is the rigging functionality in Blender pretty much the same as this already?
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Before anyone gets too excited, you might want to note that "It is a set of scripts, rigs and models for 3D Studio MAX". Current list price for 3ds max? $3495.
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does it run on Blender? :-)
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Didn't they try the same thing? Horribly bloated game engine, MMO platform, so opensource it and hope the community fixes it for you (God knows we wanted to).
It's never a bad thing to GPL code. It's just, we much prefer something that's in a semi-usable state to begin with -- why use Second Life for a project you could do with, say, Quake 3 Arena?
Of course, maybe they really do have a competitive offering here -- look what we did with Netscape, and remember how horrible Netscape 4 was!
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Yeah, I noticed the whole memory bit too. The game's rather kind to my CPU when it's not molesting my page file, but as for my memory? Let's just say my HDD doesn't shut up for a second when I play this game. They should rename the game 'City of Thrashing', because that's what you're in for.
According to what I've read and learned, while Cryptic says the game needs only as little as 256 megabytes of RAM, it really needs between one and two gigabytes to actually run smoothly. Their recommendation of 512 megabytes still falls far short of what the game really needs to run like it should, and on my system with all of 512 megabytes of RAM, it runs like shit. My page file is immediately eaten up, and the game chugs along at a moderate pace at best in the larger zones. (Which is, you know, damn near everywhere.) At worst, I'll hang for a minute or more while my HDD ticks and clicks away, only to find myself either somewhere else on the map or dead by the time the game begins responding again. (Increasing the size of my page file to the maximum allowed fixed this problem for the most part, but it's still stupidly slow.)
In short, COH-COV is a massive memory whore that really needs between two and four times the amount of RAM recommended to run it in order to run right. It's a fun game, but it's bloated as hell.
I'm very intrigued by your thoughts and would like to subscribe to your newsgroup.
Because it does more and is more graphics intensive, that's why. I know it's fashionable to whine about bloat on /., but it would be nice to at least be sure you know what you're talking about. Such as whether it's indeed some problem with the animations or, get this, it might just be that it has more graphics and physics processing than WoW.
Yeah, it needs more CPU and GPU power than WoW, but then it has bigger textures than WoW's cartoonish graphics, more layers of textures, and it uses shaders much more extensively. It also has a lot of transparency (e.g., auras, spell effects, particles, etc) which requires a lot more horsepower than rendering opaque textures. _Especially_ if some form of transparency AA is activated on that machine.
Also COH has physics, while WoW, simply put, doesn't. All enemies in WoW will do the same, say, death animation regardless of where they are, even if they end up sticking over the edge of a cliff or embedded _into_ the cliff. In COH the'll ragdoll over railings, tumble down stairs, and god knows what else. You can see how that would need more computing power, right? Now add the fact that the same physics apply to spell effects. A fireball in WoW just plays an explosion sequence of sprites, and that's that, while in COH it involves a lot of flares and sparks flying around and having physics applied to them, _and_ leaves a lot of transparent stuff around like fires burning on the floor.
It also has a lot more enemies on the screen at the same time. Whereas in WoW you'd go "OMG, need to pull one and sheep one!" at groups of 3 enemies, in COH you'd routinely deal with groups of two dozen enemies as an 8-player group. So, you know, it's more stuff to render. Add some auras, particle effects, and whatnot, and there you have your explanation why on low end machines it's slower if you don't turn off some graphics options.
It also needs a lot more RAM for all those textures, especially if a lot of people are in sight. (Since they can customize their costumes.) You might notice a massive slowdown if you're on, say, 256 MB of RAM or have most of your RAM taken by other programs. On the other hand on 1 GB it runs like greased lightning.
Also, exactly what kind of "high end" machines are we talking about? It runs OK on my other machine, which is an Athlon 2000+ (the old Athlon, not the 64) with a 6800 GT graphics card. That's... what? A 3 years old graphics card, that wasn't even the highest end at launch? No, seriously. It was launched in April 2004.
Now I'm not saying it's a capital crime to have a 3 year old computer, but, please... if you're going to throw around assessments like "it runs slow on most high-end machines", then it would help if you were actually talking about high end machines.
At any rate, I could see some point if you argued about the design decision to push the graphics effects to that extent. (Although, you _can_ reduce it a lot.) But if you're going to pass blanket judgments like that the animation code or the client itself is bloated and slow, I'll have to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
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It is painfully obvious that most of you have no clue what this is. The rig itself is just one (minor) part of the package. The important, GPLed component here is the control interface for the rig. It is written in MaxScript. No, it will never work on blender, truespace, lightwave, XSI ... none of them.
From an animator's perspective this is a valuable package if you use 3dsMax which includes a rather significant number of animators. Unfortunately, it does me no good as I use Lightwave.
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