Unit animations

[Guest John Maragoudakis]

How far will CM go in showing unit animations? For example will a machine gun squad be show placing themselves in position to shoot? Will the loader be show helping the gunner's ammo enter the machinegun?

Will a squad be shown setting up an artillary piece. Will soldiers be shown reloading?

Since these would be standard animations that were dependent on the state of the squad I would think that they wouldn't be too taxing on the cpu. Is this feasable or not for today's hardware?

[Guest Big Time Software]

You have to remember that all TEAMS are portrayed with a single figure. So there can be no assistant doing loading because, well, he ain't there Artillery and other heavy weapons are all off map, so those don't even enter into the picture. Small stuff, like mortars, are Team weapons so they fall into the "one figure" group.

You will see Team figures loading and firing their weapons when deployed. You will also see them carrying their weapons when redeploying, though not realistically (ex: a HMG is broken up and carried by 3 team members, but since we only have one figure the weapon has to remain intact). A cool thing is when towing an AT gun the Team figure rides in the vehicle doing the towing!

You are correct that 3D animations don't really tax the CPU, nor do they take up any additional memory (unlike sprites). The limitation on animation variety lies with our ability to program the actions. Unfortunately, it is a very laborious task that is done largely by hand in code. We are trying to find solutions to make this more automated, and therefore more varied, but 3D software out there sucks. Even the expensive stuff sucks Well, at least for what we need.

Don't worry, there are already plenty of actions animated in CM. Right now you can easily tell what your unit is doing simply by watching it. Once we add in the voices any subtleties will become even more apparent (i.e. running in control and in panic LOOK the same, but they won't SOUND the same )

Steve