The Character Animation Control We Only Dreamed of On True Crime
So I was deeply involved in programming the non-player characters for a lot of Luxoflux’s True Crime games. One of the things that consumed a good part of my time was devising animation controls for the characters so they could walk along streets, respond to steering, follow paths smoothly, avoid potential collisions and use a range of movement animation. It worked pretty well by the time we were done, but it got pretty involved and there was no guarantee it looked good in all situations.
So I just saw (yeah, just now) this paper and its associated video from last years Siggraph:
Hokey smokes.
Having this technology is a dream scenario compared to what things were like on True Crime. We did a small subset of this work and fixed lots of problems that this approach solves. My congratulations and thanks go out to the authors at the University of Washington and their supporters, including Sony and EA. This is fantastic stuff.