Battlezone Forums

Too many position keys? Why is there a limit to the number of position keys in an animation?

I swear that this game has pointless limits for the most ridiculous things...

Every time I try something new, I run into another limit that I didn't know existed. GRRR!!!

Well, thats a new one to me.

Send me the XSI

It's not an .xsi glitch. There really are 1035 position keys.

And THAT should be OK!!

right....

I think that some of them are excessive and can be streamlined. Model Exporters tend to export every single individual frame, when BZ2 can interpolate on its own.

You only need keyframes where something's direction or movement changes.

No, every frame is important for this. It's character animation.

Yea, so many "pointless" limits. Unless you either programmed the damn thing or lad long conversations about the specific areas in question you aren't even qualified to make that claim. Furthermore, as a programmer I find many of these limits quite sensible, even today.

Because the game would explode if it allowed longer animations?

Limiting anything is just crazy in my book. The only limits that should exist are the limits of a computer's processing power. Those limits are far in excess of these absurd super-imposed limits in the game.

bigbadbogie wrote:Because the game would explode if it allowed longer animations?

Limiting anything is just crazy in my book. The only limits that should exist are the limits of a computer's processing power. Those limits are far in excess of these absurd super-imposed limits in the game.

NOT limiting something is crazy.
You remind me of those people that think movie quality 3D models work in games where, in all honestly, poly counts like BZ2's are STILL the norm in MANY cases. A lot of work is done in modern games to shunt and improve through secondary methods, such as mesh subdivision on the GPU, normal maps, etc. If you try to force similar quality without understanding this you create something even a modern game can't handle.

Also, if the animation is too long, just make more than 1 animation. It sounds like its mission related so you should probably be using several animations animation for different states, else you are creating a highly linear process of events that can't have any adaptation for user location or movement.

You have a fundamental lack of understanding of what you speak and you act like what you say is common sense. It is frankly the opposite, you assume that computers are just magic power machines that can brute force through your massive structures of data from hell.

Every time you show up you do it to complain about some other limitation without a basic understanding for why that limitation exists and you always call it stupid or pointless or unneeded with no idea of why it is even there.

I've had to make 3D earth sized 500K+ geospatial records come back in a few milliseconds, I think I have the general qualifications to understand computer processing and data, of which you have none but still insist that your view is right without evidence. Here is an idea, don't blame the engine for an issue, blame your design for not adapting to it.

Fine. You've made your point. You're a computer genius, and I'm not.

The way I work is this: If it doesn't cause an FPS drop, it's good to go.

The game can run 2 animations which make up the same length as one long animation, so why is there a need to split it?

The way to test if something will work in the game is simple: Put it in there. If the game handles it, fine. If not, it will crash. That is what the limit should be.

I find it hard to imagine what you are animating that actually needs 1035 keyframes. I usually try to use 6 or maybe 8...
4 is good if you want it to look smooth. Bz2 is quite good at smoothing out animations, its just a question of getting the keys in the right place. Its bz2 not come dancing.
Even with every key position used that's a 35 second animation minimum (at 30 frames per second), unless its 35 seconds of horrible stuff going rapidly back and forth in different directions you just don't need to set them all.
Assuming this is a scripted event of some kind, then you just need to string several animations together rather than doing it all in one go.

Why are there limits on this? You might as well ask why bridges over roads have signs as to how tall they are. Your request is like asking why you can't drive a windmill around on roads because bridge designers should have planned for your request. In the end, it's all an engineering problem -- nothing's free. Really. Learn that.

-- GSH

GSH wrote:Your request is like asking why you can't drive a windmill around on roads because bridge designers should have planned for your request.

Uh... nice comparison there.

And this isn't so much a request as a complaint. And not only a complaint about this, but a generalised complaint against the BZ2 engine and every one of its limitations, of which I have probably run into most at one point or another. Yes, I know - complaining solves little, but it does make me feel better to unload my annoyances - numerous as they are.

I play modern games all of the time and I'm always seeing some nifty little feature here or there and thinking - yeah - I'll try and do that in BZ2. So, I try it in BZ2. And I hit a limitation about a thousandth of the way in.

Then I run into a totally inexplicable glitch or some sort and am forced to abandon my idea. This has happened more times than I could count.

That's why I complain about BZ2's limitations. They're killing the romance.

MrTwosheds wrote:I find it hard to imagine what you are animating that actually needs 1035 keyframes. I usually try to use 6 or maybe 8...
4 is good if you want it to look smooth. Bz2 is quite good at smoothing out animations, its just a question of getting the keys in the right place. Its bz2 not come dancing.
Even with every key position used that's a 35 second animation minimum (at 30 frames per second), unless its 35 seconds of horrible stuff going rapidly back and forth in different directions you just don't need to set them all.
Assuming this is a scripted event of some kind, then you just need to string several animations together rather than doing it all in one go.

It's proper character animation. The people have lip-syncing, and that lip-syncing takes up a ridiculous number of keyframes. This animation was very short compared to most of them. Some are up to 10000 keyframes. Needless to say, all character animation in QF2 is now standing on razor's edge.

Not to mention that I've discovered a new animation glitch. For long animations, after a few keyframes are up, an seemingly random segment of the animation will stutter. It will lose its ability to flow and just stutter from point to point. Oddly, it appears in the exact same segment of animation each time around. This is especially obvious for lip-syncing as the animation suddenly goes completely out of sync.

This could be reproduced if I chose to release QF2 assets, but I'd like to know if anyone else has seen this in the mean time.

gotta remember, like nathan says, this game was designed to run on a single-core pentium 166Mhz with a few MB of RAM.

instead of getting frustrated, maybe celebrate that you found something no one else has.

gotta look on the bright side

You also need to figure out that Keyframes are supposed to be KEY frames. You are not supposed to use them all. Some are supposed to be unkeyed so that there is something left for the engine to interpolate between them with. I am not surprised it is going wrong.