Cryptic Studios Open Sources Animation Tools 43
GameDev.net reports that Cryptic Studios (makers of the Massive title City of Heroes) has released a powerful animation tool under the GPL. Called CrypticAR, for Cryptic Animation Rig, the software will allow animators to bring 3d models to life via a toolkit of scripts and rigs. "'Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL,' said Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios. 'We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR.'"
Is it just me? (Score:1, Insightful)
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It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps
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in my experience, that is not the case. I have found memory to be more important than cpu.
and from experiences in the CoV closed beta I strongly believe that their art team has carte blanche to implement stuff without optimization or consulting with the coding teams.
well, it was a beta.
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to
Fun With Memory (Score:3, Informative)
According to what I've read and learned, while Cryptic says the game needs only as little as 256 megabytes of RAM, it really needs between one and two gigabytes to actually run smoothly. Their recommendation of 512 megab
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As for 'it's a beta', that does nothing to explain why little has been done to improve what's still there. I wouldn't have commented on any of that, save for the fact that things like the sour spot, and Grandville's godawful geometry and the like are suc
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Funny you should mention Second Life... (Score:2)
It's never a bad thing to GPL code. It's just, we much prefer something that's in a semi-usable state to begin with -- why use Second Life for a project you could do with, say, Quake 3 Arena?
Of course, maybe they really do have a competitive offering here -- look what we did with Netscape, and remember how horrible Netscape 4 was!
Because it does more, that's why (Score:2)
Yeah, it needs more CPU and GPU power than WoW, but then it has bigger textures than WoW's cartoonish graphics, more layers of textures, and it uses shaders much more e
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There are places in City of Villains that can drop me to single-digit framerates.
Granted, I'm playing at 1920x1200 and high graphics settings, but that same graphics card can manage FarCry at over 100fps at that resolution..
I did some very simple performance profiling of a variety of different CPUs and graphics cards in CoV,
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well (Score:4, Funny)
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well first things first (Score:2)
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Windows and 3D Max required... (Score:1, Insightful)
Requires 3DS Max (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone from the Blender team reads this, how realistic would it be to incorporate this stuff into Blender? Or is the rigging functionality in Blender pretty much the same as this already?
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"If anyone from the Blender team reads this, how realistic would it be to incorporate this stuff into Blender? Or is the rigging functionality in Blender pretty much the same as this already?"
It is a rig, Ie it is a setup of bones, constraints, and drivers - so almost certainly something similar could be set up in Blender. I don't think it is even possible to 'copyright' a rig (it is pretty much purely functional it can't really be claimed to have expressive elements). They probably just don't understa
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Before you get too excited (Score:3, Informative)
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Gentlemen, start Azureus.
But... (Score:2)
Open-source? (Score:5, Informative)
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Though it's not as warm and fuzzy as if they made their newest product free software it is still good for the community IMO. Heck, think about how awesome would it be if this sort of behavior were commonplace such as if MS decided to GPL Office 97, a version now obsolete for more than half a decade.
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And I guess Cryptic Deluxe will be under the GPL too, since it will be built over the GPL'd lite version.
http://www.crypticar.com/LICENSE.TXT [crypticar.com]
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So... there is no "deluxe" and "lite". This is full-blown tool that Cryptic uses.
Obviously no 3D artists here (Score:1)
From an animator's perspective this is a valuable package if you use 3dsMax which includes a rather significant number of animators. Unfortunately, it does me no good as I use Lightwave.