civillian children

[icebreakr 3107]

... and to give us a chance to give out lollypops instead of lead =)

[dr_chris 10]

That's disgusting man.

[nodunit 397]

I say add the kids..... and give the little heathens the ability to throw rocks at you...... you know, for realism sake.....

That would be quite the feat, afaik the skeleton in Arma 1 and 2 is very specific about height and shape, now that I think about it the reason we probably have never seen anything about a kid addon would be that it just isn't as easily possible.

[Archamedes 10]

a lot of people are saying they are awkward to make and animate and are generally a lot of work for the effort, but ever since the first addon for flashpoint came out there have been many what i would class as pointless and useless addons which must have taken a lot of effort and time to make but someone wanted to do it so they did

[nodunit 397]

It's not quite so much that it's useless and pointless as much as very very difficult, some engine limitations can be broken or faked, others not so much and animation is certainly not something you can easily fake.

A smaller skeleton would render a large and rather ugly amount of model stretching and deformation, very likely that said child wouldn't be recognizeable as a human much less anything for that matter.

Someone with more experience on IK could probably say more or prove me wrong though, I'm not at all an expert or very knowledgeable on it, it's just what I heard from someone working on something similar a year back.

[rocket 9]

Animations in ArmA/ArmA2 are baked out as vertex selection movements, with each selection a "bone" of sorts.

You would have to "rebake" out all animations from the animation source (which would never be released, nor should it!) to the bones for an entirely new skeleton of a child, as NodUnit stated. Lacking the ArmA source animation files for Max/Maya etc... you would not only have to rebake them out, but actually recreate them from scratch. It's also possible that adult animations wouldn't work on a child.

In fact, not only would you have to do that - but you'd have to make the tools in order to do such a thing!

So, you have to:

• Make the model and texture them
  
• Skin the model to a skeleton in Max/Maya
  
• Make the animations (over 100 seperate animations)
  
• Write a tool to fully bake animations (we have some tools, but they're too limited for what you need)
  
• Put it all together
  

Now, the animation work alone is enough for two good professional animators over three/six months. I know that because I worked at Sidhe Interactive as a Producer (we made the rugby league games, lots of animations in that). The tools work requires a very good tech-artist, for probably one month, assuming he has access to the documentation for the RTM standards, etc...

If you managed to achieve the above, it would be a first in the entire series of OFP games. An entirely new model, with an entirely new set of animations.

I apply the Fermi Paradox here; as you said - they'res been plenty of useless addons made over the years... so if its possible for such an addon to be made... where are they?

I mean, this entire thing is completely ridiculous, moral arguments aside. It's just so complex and difficult you may as well be suggesting a complete rework of the game. Even our best and brightest modders can't even get existing models with similar structure (such as the women in ArmA2) to work with all the current animations.

[Aeneas2020 10]

So, you have to:

• Make the model and texture them
  
• Skin the model to a skeleton in Max/Maya
  
• Make the animations (over 100 seperate animations)
  
• Write a tool to fully bake animations (we have some tools, but they're too limited for what you need)
  
• Put it all together
  

What the gentleman above me said is 100% correct. I was on a team trying to do custom anims for an Unreal 2.5 engine game. Without the dev very kindly giving us the stock anim source, models, rigging skeleton etc it would have taken us years to recreate everything from scratch and thats with a model the same size as the stock one. Unless someone could work on this full time and was a whizz with 3ds max it would be a very long process.

[sparks50 0]

I dont see any needs for children in this game, I do not want such horrors of real life war replicated on my computer.

Edited November 17, 2009 by sparks50

[icebreakr 3107]

Rocket: how did ColonelWell put a Scorpion in A1 and various creatures, like Ants?

[rocket 9]

Rocket: how did ColonelWell put a Scorpion in A1 and various creatures, like Ants?

He alternated the use of two leg selections with raw movement of a single bone (one leg = one bone). The animation of such animals is extremely simply compared to that of a biped human. If you look at the animation of the scorpion ColonelWell made, you'll see that its just moving position with little deformation. If you try to do that with a human (many animation bones), it will look extremely odd.

You need to have the vertices in the right positions and relation to each other to achieve the correct deformation for human-like movement.

I tried to achieve the use of decent deforming animations (with results similar in quality to the BI models) for a dog with ArmA1, and failed miserably despite enlisting two workmates. The main area of difficulty is lack of adequate tools, followed by lack of usable and complete source animation data.

[killakaze 10]

so are arma and vbs2 completly different engines?

someone said early in this thread that there are children in vbs2.

[Zipper5 74]

ArmA and VBS2 both run on VirtualReality2. OFP runs on VirtualReality1, and ArmA II runs on VirtualReality3. VBS2 has a modified version of VirtualReality2 though, I'd imagine, due to all the things VBS2 does and ArmA doesn't, but it's mostly the same.

[icebreakr 3107]

Rocket: so basically BIS (or one of affiliates) went the long way and created new anims for children in VBS2? Ouch.

[rocket 9]

Rocket: so basically BIS (or one of affiliates) went the long way and created new anims for children in VBS2? Ouch.

Any new rig will have a new set of animations. If you have the source rig you might be able to skin a new model to that and rebake some RTM's off it. But you'll still need new RTM's.

You get your modeller to make the model, and either them or the animator then "rigs" it to a skeleton. Then you apply your animations to the skeleton. I'm not sure whether BIS/BIA use Max or Maya for their animations, but somehow they bake their animations out to linear RTM files that are then called by the engine. This saves alot of CPU time from, say, Havoc type "rag doll" animations and such.

BIA made VBS2, not BIS. I imagine they used similar tools. The animation tools they use, for Max/Maya, will be quite significant. Also - purchasing or motion capturing the required animations is a good way to kick start the animation building proces, followed by much cleanup.

I've had involvement in this area, motioncapturing animation, or getting it from stock libraries - is in the tens of thousands of dollars. Then you need to clean it up and make it work for your rig, and your movements.

Remember: Militaries, such as the NZDF which I am familiar with, spend hundreds of thousands - if not millions - in developing and tailoring the implementation to suit their specific requirements.

I believe you can do many wonderous things with ArmA/VBS - but you are limited severely by the time required to achieve them. Tools are your route to cutting down time requirements (hence MaskMapper and LineMapper), but these take a great deal of thinking and understanding. It took me two years, and much research - to pull together the concept of both tools in such a way they were useful.

This topic is a source of annoyance to me, not because of the moral implications - but because a massive moral debate is occuring over something that nobody is going to be making any time soon... when we have plenty of other issues our community should be dealing with... like making ourselves tools to better support our activities, creating tutorials, supporting addon sites like armaholic and armedassault.info with donations, opening our source files and joining our projects. And less "Discussion" posts with WIP's that never happen, more "Completed" posts with addons :)

[[aps]gnat 28]

I believe you can do many wonderous things with ArmA/VBS

Yes ..... and as you know first hand, a few of us on this thread have actually done that in the past.

During the time this thread has evolved I've release two addons to the public. 2 Addons mind you that are far more interesting than some ambient "child" addons.

This topic is a source of annoyance to me

Chill mate, this is an "all talk" thread ;)