Icarus Studios News

(Continued from Part 1)

Sound effects linked to models aren’t the only thing we can test before loading a character into a game. Environmental factors that impact a character, such as lighting or particle effects, can also be simulated. Obviously, in any given online game, both objects and characters can possess special effect capabilities—like having fireballs shoot out of their palms or glowing after they drink a healing potion, or something. The Icarus Particle Editor enables the creation and modification of both 2D and 3D particle effects—such as smoke, fire, bullet impacts, fireworks, floating bubbles, confetti, and explosions, just to name a few. Lighting, created in Level Editor (to be discussed in a later post), and particle effects can both be seen in Character Prep, allowing the designer to see how well the model holds up under different conditions and animated sequences. For instance, if that dapper young man running around with his gun were to get shot, I could mimic the bullet impact and blood splatter and make sure it looked realistic.

Often times, trouble comes when trying to blend two or more animations together. Not only is it tricky to get different animations to interact without showing gaps or cancelling each other out, but it’s important to assign each animation a place in a character’s hierarchy of needs. For instance, a primary animation, such as running, should be assigned more weight than a secondary animation, such as shooting a gun—but if you wish your character to run and fire his weapon at the same time, something is needed to blend those animations together. (It’s rarely a good thing when your player character’s lower half starts running one way while the upper half starts shooting at bad guys in the other direction. I suppose it does afford you the element of surprise…)

In case staying in one piece and completing even the most basic of simultaneous motions is important to a gamer, Icarus invented a tool named Bone Blender. With it, a wide variety of animations can be quickly and seamlessly mixed together in almost limitless combinations—instead of each combined motion requiring a custom-made animation, which would take from now until the end of time for designers and animators to complete. (And some of us have lives. Well, we have other geek activities we’d like to get to, really.) Anyway, during the preview stage, Bone Blender moves a character’s (or a creature’s) entire body as if it were a living being—complete with realistic values for weight, inertia, and skeletal structure—showing how one animation will affect and interact with the model’s other animations. Multiple characters and bolt-ons can be loaded into the Bone Blender, and you can switch between them instantly; when doing this, I like to insist that the interns at Icarus refer to me as “Puppet-Master” and bow before me, but each designer has his or her own preferred creative method.

Basically, the point of this post is that my company put a lot of thought into the minutia that goes into making characters, so players wouldn’t have to. The sounds, motions, and realistic, cohesive looks for in-world characters have all been tested and retested and then, just for fun, tested again. So when players log in to one of our games, they can be assured that they’ll have a chance to make a completely unique avatar that represents whatever personal style they wished to express. Now, that may not earn us a place in any pantheons any time soon, but it at least helps to make Icarus a titan among virtual worlds and MMO gaming companies. Which is a particular bonus for me, because I’ve been waiting all this time to fly around on my winged pony and release the Kraken!

“A man's character is his fate.” — Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (c. 540-c. 475 B.C.)

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team