The first setbacks

This is what I've been waiting for all this time. Things finally started to not go so smoothly.

Last couple weeks have been a struggle. We've tried to animate our characters, but things resist our efforts as they best can. Everything is all fine and dandy as far as we keep the 3D models unanimated and just let them slide across the game world. When an animation starts playing, things go wrong and the model turns into distorted, undistinguishable mess.

At first nobody seemed to have any idea what's wrong and how to fix it. I've not played animations on 3D models before and don't have the experience or knowledge to outright point out where to start debugging, so on my part fixing the issue has been largely poking around blindly and hoping to hit something. Our animators and modelers have apparently not worked with this file format before and that seems to have resulted in that they also are fumbling in the dark. It has largely been me who has had to import and export the models from one file format to another, and it really is not a good thing considering that I just barely have any idea how to use the software to do the job.

After a week we finally got help from an outside sorce, a teacher who has not been involved directly with us before. I explained the problem and he spent a while with his laptop examining the situation and the models. I don't know what he found out bu he talked with the local artists for a while and after that the animations I've been handed to by the artists have worked better. We still don't have perfectly working animations, but now the distortions are much lesser and one can make out what the model is actually supposed to represent. We still need to work out the minor distortions that appear on the animated models.

Another thing that worries me is that now all the necessary animations are in a single take all clumbed together. Basically there is just one long animation sequence, where the character first does the walking animation, then after that attacks, then jumps etc. etc. I need to come up with a system that plays only specific frames from that one long animation to separate walking animation from attack animation and such. This is problematic, because initially I had the impression that different animations could be separated into different takes that would then be easy to call from the code. The file format indeed supports this, but it seems that the tools we are using here do not take advantage of this and force us to use only one take that contains all the animations. I did not allocate time for doing the separation of the animations by hand in the schedule, so this is going to set us back even more in addition to the extra time we've spent getting the animations to play at all in the first place.

I also discovered another flaw in my initial plans: the state management system I'm using is designed for having only one globl state active and responding to input at any given time. This means that currently all four players have to be in the same state all the time, one player can't have a menu open while three other players duke it out on the battlefield. This leads to a situation where one player can't join the game on the fly and get in through a character selection menu while the others are playing. Currently I see three options open here: change the initial plans and make a game where the players start the game in a synchronised manner so that they all get out of the character selection menu and start the game at the same time; or come up with a workaround and make slight (and possibly messy) adjustments to the state management system to allow the desired behaviour; or rewrite the whole state management system. I do have some ideas for a workaround, I just need to make sure whatever I end up using won't get on my way later on and end up setting the schedule back more than a rewrite of the state management system would.