Happy New Year Everyone,
Just a quick update on what’s going on with our packs. The blueprint controller is forefront and trickle down dictating a few things.
Our friend Jesse with 3 Prong Gaming](https://www.youtube.com/user/ShortBusTrip) has still been working hard in his free time on the blueprint controller for our Mobility pack. The “Basic” pack at the moment (There are Pro/Basic/Starter packs on our store, only Zombie has the three versions on the Marketplace right now), which has about half the animations of the full Pro pack. The controller therefore has less capabilities than the Pro will, but he’s using that as a starting point with lessons learned for the far more complete Pro pack next. It’s looking pretty good and has gamepad support with analog stick movement and acceleration. The Pro version will add a large amount of animations filling in 45 angles and transitions, so it will have it’s bugs and caveats to work through.
It’s my understanding he’s using Root motion as well as In-Place in combination for the best results from both. We have also test split the IP jumps into takeoff/air-loop/landing which is looking great. The full set of 3 way split jumps still needs to be created for Basic and the full Pro pack, so a lot of work left to do to get him all animations needed for proposed controller.
All IP animations in the new controller/pack will also have custom attribute curves and be labeled “IPC” as such. We boiled it down to two custom curves to keep it simple and most useful: “Speed” and “Rot(yaw)”. Speed will be the cm/sec for all directions, and Rot(yaw) will be deg/sec for turning L/R. (This is in contrast to the the multiple curves we did for the Zombie IPC animations and controller, which we may revise - another discussion) User input will specify direction so for most situations only one speed variable is needed.
So Jesse is tweaking a few things with me for Mobility Basic, then I will make and modify any and all new animations (split jumps, IPC attributes, etc.) for Basic and Pro to function fully, and get the Pro controller also tweaked to our satisfaction where we feel okay about a public release.
Then, ultimately all this knowledge will be copied/applied to making similar controllers for Rifle, Pistol and Ninja. The Ninja will definitely benefit from a good jump system (and yes we are still looking at redoing the evil hands/arms many are asking for a more generic pose).
Which brings up the Pistol update. A number of people are asking for the long overdue Pistol update now, but it makes most sense to complete the update with the new animation set/list needed for the controller, not spend a large amount of time on an old list. So when we lock down the Mobility controller specs/animations they will be applied to the Pistol update as a model to replicate. The same basic deal with the Ninja update, copy the Mobility controller specs, which is long overdue.
SO…
All this means the exact date of all these updates is still uncertain, but we want and need to do it right looking forward. We’ve been working on other private contracts, going through missed stuff from the holidays, finishing OEM arch viz anims for a couple of vendors, etcetc., AND looking at best way to proceed in updating our packs including the UE4 versions of course. (UE4 is the only platform we are making controllers for) We are having meetings the rest of the week to try to put a more detailed plan together.
Sorry for the long and a bit meandering post with no bullet points, just wanted to check in and let everyone know we are working on a bit of everything. It seems the WIP controller progress is important and will positively affect and direct current and other packs moving forward. Jesse is the brains at this point with the controller, I am tester and feedback. Please feel free to contact him with questions or comments.
Cheers,
Cris