Fable Dev Blog: A Room with a Preview

[Albion Knight]

Kalev From Lionhead talks about working with paired animations, creating a tools and using action tools

First amongst my tasks was a bit of a monster. The animators (and others) required a way to preview paired animations in the editor before they went into the game. A paired animation is two animations each running on one of two separate characters with some pre-determined offset from each other. Not too bad you say. Except that up till this point, all of the animation previews we’ve got in the editor are on a single character. The entire animation system within the editor assumes that you’ll only be viewing one animation (or animation sequence, or layered animation, or animation bank etc.) at a time. Viewing two characters at the same time doing two different things was something that our system had never taken into account.

Then it was off to work on some small UI and workflow improvements to the action tools. The action tools are the tools that let designers take an attack animation, add events to it (such as when the attack can switch to another attack or when it provides an opening to a counter attack) and then make small time based adjustments to the speed of individual parts of the animation such that the end attack is better balanced with other attacks.

Finally, I got to fix a bug that I’d created at the beginning of the week. Remember how there was this big deal about putting two characters into the same animation preview window that turned out not to be a big deal? Well, it turned out that my solution was a little broken. It caused a complication in the 3d paste tool (which is the tool which lets the level editors paste objects at specific points within a level), and likely other areas as well. Seems I’d inadvertently made all objects have two locations, a ‘real’ one and one that was used for ‘secondary’ characters when their animations were being viewed. And the 3d paste tool was using the wrong one. Oops.

Pretty techy but an interesting read
Fable 2 Development : A Room with a Preview

[Dark Drakan]

Always good to hear about the actual technology testing and designing that goes on underneath what we see. Really interesting to hear early concepts, bugs, glitches and how they overcame certain 'problems' and issues. Really good read +rep.