Holy Shit, Robots!

[Tobs]

Thinking about it... when you have very simple animation like that, it should be possible to code it.
In my MD5 loader you can edit armatures with code, so if it's something simple like rotating, then I can just set the armature's direction to the direction you need to point in.
Zapman you animation is simple, it's just changing the direction, but Traylorpark's will likely involve altering the position the robot is in so it can aim.
Both ways work fine (so the way you've done is also great!) but it could be a little less work for you.. =]

Frame rate, I'm going to aim for 30 FPS.
That robot is quickly becoming the cutest thing I want to kill me, looks great!

Tobs

 

[traylorpark]

Alright, so here is a rig, that is pretty versatile. My concern is how many bones are in there, I'm not sure of the limitations your up against Tobs.

So with that, I did a demo cannon shooting animation. The GIF plays it back about half speed .... so, it looks better at 30 FPS.

And if you wanna see a turntable of the robot ... check out this .MOV file.

Tobs, what are you imagining as the fate for this little guy ... could it be a player character? or an enemy?

 

[fusion_power]

This indeed looks interesting. But It also looks like these Models have way to much polygons for the limited Pandora GFX Skills.
I think the SGX Unit is good but still not a PC graphics card. So are there any tests of how much 3D Stuff the Pandora really can handle at stable FPS? Including Sound, AI and Environment for the Models of Course.

 

[torpor]

I'm really loving this project - Tobs, how are you animating the md5 files? Can Blender export these animations to md5, or could you consider just reading the .blend format instead?

 

[traylorpark]

This indeed looks interesting. But It also looks like these Models have way to much polygons for the limited Pandora GFX Skills.
I think the SGX Unit is good but still not a PC graphics card. So are there any tests of how much 3D Stuff the Pandora really can handle at stable FPS? Including Sound, AI and Environment for the Models of Course.

Well, Tobs said a primary character model can sit between 1 - 4k polys. Right now, that model is at 1.5k polys (quads and tris) ... if the engine requires tris, it goes up to about 3k. Of course, nobody has a Pandora yet, so we can't check the actual performance. If the model is too expensive, I can always optimize more (at the sacrifice some detail) It will certainly be an interesting stress test though! I also baked an ambient occlusion map to the texture ... that helps make it look like it has more polys then are actually there.

 

[Tobs]

Wow Peter, that looks really cool!
Unfortunately I don't know the limitations either. The Pandora's a pretty powerful device, but exactly what it can do will be unknown until I get my engine running on it!
I'm hoping ~100k polys/frame though, seems like a reasonable target. There's lots of things I could do to speed up my engine too, but there's really no point until it's on the Pandora.
Currently AI is very simple (it doesn't really need to be complex in this kind of game), and I'll limit it to fairly basic sound, so the game's logic shouldn't have much of a footprint. Of course, collision detection still takes ages, but again there's loads I can optimize there, or rewrite in ASM (very daunting task )

I think tanky will be great as an advanced attack unit; cannon to take out the targets on the way to the enemy base, and missiles for taking out the aircraft when it gets there!
So both on the player's team and against it!

Blender can export to MD5 with some plugins. But what I really like about MD5 is that the mesh and the animation files are separate, so really easy to handle. The actual MD5 code is taken from a thousand places, hacked together, printed out, put in a USB meat grinder and finally converted to ES2.0 compatible Open GL.
.blend files are great for loading into blender, because they include all sorts of information (scene setup, camera angles, materials, lighting, keyframes, scripts, settings etc), but all I need for a game is the model, the texture and the animation. Lots less work!

Also, thanks for showing an interest =] I saw in someone's sig a while back "don't just look, post so devs know you're interested"... definitely true!

Edit: Yup, what Traylorpark said!

 

[torpor]

Of course, nobody has a Pandora yet, so we can't check the actual performance.

I have a Touchbook, same basic hardware. If you want me to test something on it, I can do that! It will give you some rough ideas about what you can expect from the Pandora, if not pretty close ..

 

[traylorpark]

Hey thanks Tobs!

I just spent some time tweaking the animation and giving the wheels some bouncing action ... then I realized ... a few months ago I made the switch to Blender 2.5 (most recent downloaded from graphicall) Does your MD5 export play with 2.5 yet?

In other news, I'll go ahead and do some assorted animations for different situations (turning, missiles, loving etc) And don't forget, tanky has jets, can probably do some hovering/jumping stuff (or go really fast).

 

[Tobs]

Erm, I guess it'll work. Doesn't use anything fancy afaik, unlikely they've changed the way blender scripts work that'll stop it. If not, there'll be an update soon probably!

Being able to boost a little bit would be neat, in fitting with making it an advanced attack unit (like getting to the enemy base fast). Hovering/jumping might be a bit redundant though, I'm not sure where that'd fit in.

Thanks for the offer, Torpor, but I can't really justify doing that instead of writing assignments currently =p
It should be great timing; getting the pandora just after submission date!

edit: lol wait wha? Loving? =p