Thanks Helghast, I will drop you an email a little later if that's ok?
Sure
I've spent a fair amount of time myself working with bones, including rigging up a head to turn and follow players, moving eyes at the correct amount etc. So I am pretty happy that I can write it ,although it sounds like your script might save me some time there, much appreicated.
Good that definatly helps in setting it up... however it's mroe about setting up the ragdoll physics objects properly.
I am working with 3D Studio max and Biped, so all my bones are named and easily referenced so that shouldn't be to hard to setup.
My questions are really about performance, for example, do you need to run a lot of tracing to get the final rest position or does the bones system support some kind of physics collision? What are the overheads if that is true?
It's physics impacts using ODE (I guess it can be updated for PXent or Newton just as easy), which with alot of collisions does tend to be a bit slow
The title I am working on at the moment can have around 30 active agents including up to four players over network / internet, so it would be really good to have an idea how to manage this.
I suspect that ragdoll during death will be client side only, as the final resting position of the model will not be critical, unless they interact with other entities (something I am not planning on at present).
30 active ragdolls might make a pc go slow... you'll have to pull out some tricks (updating bones only when a certain degree was rotated, and after a certain amount of ragdolls disable earlier ones, etc etc)...
Thanks for sharing, please let me know if you (or anyone else) has any more advice.
it's alot of setting things up properly, but when it's done and working it's definatly worth it, good luck!
you can drop me a line whenever you need some advice.
kind regards,
