[IDEA] Blitz Sonic Generations fan game

[BlueBlur97]

What's "Dynamic Tweaking"?

[Previous]

"Tweening". "Tween" is short for "in-between" and refers to frames between to key frames. "Tweening" is the process of creating tweens.
If you have 20FPS animations, but a 60FPS engine, you would have to draw each animation frame three times. Thus, your 60 FPS would look like 20 to the player. However, tweens could be generated by the engine to fill the gaps between two animation frames, making the animation look a lot more fluid.

[BlueBlur97]

So can this meathod work for animation transitions?

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So can this meathod work for animation transitions?

[Hoeloe]

Depending on how it's implemented, yes.

[BlueBlur97]

What do you mean? Can you give me a full explanation?

[Hoeloe]

Well, it's a tool that can be applied in a number of different ways, and at different times. Providing a full explanation is time consuming, difficult and somewhat pointless, because if you understand the basic concept, it's not too hard to infer most of the rest of it.

The idea of tweening is that you supply some basic frames for your animation, and any frames in between are added automatically. This can be applied in multiple different ways, since you can tween different parts of a model with different values of easing (easing being a term used for the distribution of speed of the object. With no easing, speed will be constant, with easing, the movement will accelerate or decelerate depending on the easing value. To make this work properly, you'll need to mix and match easing values depending on context. There are other parameters you can apply, but they aren't completely necessary).

In order to do tweening, you'll need a tool that supports it. Now is where I'll talk about what I meant by "applying it at different times".

When making any program, things can be done at 3 different points: Compile time (hard-coded into the program), load time (set up while the program is loading) or run time (dynamically running alongside everything else). The more you have happening at run time, the slower your program will run, however, the more freedom you have to adapt it to circumstance. This can also be applied to tweening. In most cases, games will apply the tweens at compile time (or rather, upon making the animations), so the game will read the animation as a series of frames at 60 FPS, and treat the tweens no differently from normal frames. This means little processing has to be done at run time to make the animations work, and the results will be consistent. However, it is technically possible to apply tweens at run time. This will, of course, take more processing, since the game will have to calculate the in-between frames on the fly, but in doing so, you can automatically smooth out transitions between different animations. There is also, however, the potential for the tweens to break, and cause awkward animation bugs (such as the "legs flailing everywhere" sort of thing you see in Gary's Mod a lot), which would not occur with pre-applied tweens.

I do not recommend applying tweens at run-time unless you know what you're doing.

[alexmach1]

think of it like this:
halo 1
you have a character with a standing animation.
suddenly, your character wants to pull out a gun.
the animation shows the character going from standing to having a gun in his hand. there is no animation to show it getting pulled out.
tweening will make it so the character will smoothly transition from one pose to the other.
now the character has tweening.
he goes from standing to moving his arms up to the gun holding position, rather than an instant pose.

a great example is here

the hunter transitions from the jumping pose to the running pose, even though they arent animated together.
later in the vid, it goes from t-pose to standing, but eases into the pose rather than popping up.
hope this helped explain this.

...and right when i finished writing this, hoeloe ninja'd me. gj

[Hoeloe]

(05-20-2012 03:48 PM)alexmach1 Wrote:  ...and right when i finished writing this, hoeloe ninja'd me. gj

Well, you did give a rather neat example.

The video alexmach posted shows a prime example of tweening at run-time, since the animations were clearly not made beforehand (if they were, the T-pose would not be there, since that is the default "blank" pose for when an animation doesn't exist).

[BlueBlur97]

OMG! I LOVE YOU GUYS!!! You don't know how much you guys helped me!

Alexmach1, do you want to help? (what about you Hoeloe?)

[Hoeloe]

I have my own commitments, so I don't have the time to help you with this.

[BlueBlur97]

No problem! You've already helped loads!

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No problem! You've already helped loads!

[alexmach1]

while i am practicing my programming skills, i have no knowledge in blitzbasic. i can help you with 3d graphics questions tho

[Hoeloe]

(05-20-2012 04:57 PM)BlueBlur97 Wrote:  No problem! You've already helped loads!

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No problem! You've already helped loads!

I'm also hopeless with Basic-based languages. I'm a C-based programmer for the most part. However, I may be able to help with theory questions and possibly some programming practice questions and such.

[BlueBlur97]

How do I make textures into SFX? Like splashing and explotion effects...

[Hoeloe]

Those are usually particle effects, They're worth looking up.