Developer dossier

Ross Hopwood

Systems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

All 2 answers
2answers
2018active
Calling All Devsmost heard in
Physicstop topic

Topics

Answers per year

2018 · 2
20182018

Recent transmissionslatest 2 of 2

With it being so difficult to find a perfectly flat area to land, will we eventually be able to grab and ull ourselves up to a landing ramp or elevator pad that may not fully reach the ground on uneven terrain?

Ross HopwoodSystems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

So not currently, because this would basically be mantling. We have a vaulting and mantling system, being able to jump up and over things or jump up onto things. But currently everything is manually set up, so we've got a lot of manual markup. Something that we do want to look into is procedural markup for vaulting and mantling. So the scenario that you've just described, basically, if the height requirement for the surface that you want to jump onto, so the lift, is high enough to justify having to mantle up onto it, then in the scenario where we have the procedural markup, you'd be able to do so. If it's low enough, obviously, you can just jump onto it. That's something that would hopefully be covered with this procedural method.

Calling All Devs›Aspects of Flight and Landing·
Published on this date.6 Aug 2018

Does this play into the motion warping thing [we highlighted on Around the Verse recently]?

TL;DRYes, vaulting and mantling were used to prototype motion warping, which extends animation sections to fit different obstacle sizes and gives smoother transitions.

Ross HopwoodSystems Designer, Foundry 42 UK

Yeah. So the last ATV we covered, we basically used our current vaulting and mantling system to prototype motion warping. So what that is, is it's extending animations for periods of time so that you can extend whatever animation that it is that you want. This can only work for animation-driven motion, by the way. So it's anything that, once the animation is playing, it's going to move the player somewhere whilst the animation is playing. So what we did was, because all of our animations for vaulting and mantling were kind of specific to specific metrics, to be able to jump over a specific wall, a specific depth, that kind of thing, now what we can do is have one animation that has every part of that. So the part where you climb the wall, going across the top of it and then the exit. And then what we can do is mark this up now to extend it. So we can say this wall is two times the length of what the animation would have been, but that section of the animation where you're climbing over the top can kind of be extended for this new depth. So that's what motion warping is basically, and we use that for vaulting and mantling. It's a lot smoother, because previously the segments of the animation were all separate. So now we're able to stitch them all together and it's a very nice, smooth transition from one to the next.

Calling All Devs›Aspects of Flight and Landing·
Published on this date.6 Aug 2018

All developers