[xoreos-devel] KotOR animations

[Sven Hesse]

Hej!

On 2017-08-20 19:26:32 +0700, Vsevolod Kremianskii wrote:
> Hello. I'm interested in tinkering with KotOR animations in xoreos. What is
> the current state of that feature? I noticed there already is a dedicated
> branch for that (kotoranim).

Well, that branch is mainly there to hold a commit that displays some
testing/debugging code to show how xoreos currently evaluates the
KotOR animations.

There's two issues with KotOR animations at the moment:

First, we don't really know much about how the values in the model
files should be interpreted.

Second, we do know that the animations, or at least many of them, are
bone-weight-animations. I.e. they only change the underlying skeleton
(made up of model nodes), and the mesh vertices are then deformed,
according to weights, to fit the skeleton.

This is different from the animations in NWN that we currently
support. There, the meshes aren't deformed, just rotated and moved
whole-sale alongside the model nodes.

We currently don't support deforming animations at all.

(NWN also does deforming animations for some meshes, most prominently
cloaks, but xoreos doesn't support that there yet either.)

So basically, the first step would be to figure out how to interpret
the animations values in the model files, or see if somebody else
already has. From what I remember reading in the Deadly Steam forums
(the most popular KotOR modding forums) [1], the KotOR modding
community hasn't figured that one out either, so the information would
be valuable to them as well.

I'm not sure if Farmboy0 or Supermanu or anybody else did some
research on this, though. Please chime in here if you have, thanks. :)

As for implementing this animation scheme in xoreos, that's going to
be relatively difficult and fiddly. I myself am not sure how to do
that right now either. Currently, the renderer in xoreos is
fixed-function OpenGL, without any new features or even shader
support. mirv is in the process of rewriting it to be a tad more
modern, but it's going to take a while still.

If you have any idea or experience there, that would probably be
helpful. :P


Cheers,
Sven


[1] http://deadlystream.com/forum/
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