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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.'"
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?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
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.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps) and the geometry holes that are still there to this day. New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.
Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly. Using that bug, I flew over to the University for a sneak peek... and as soon as I was close enough for it to load, my frame-rates dropped right into the toilet.
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.