Hello guys, today I came to ask how the animations and bones engine will work because I don’t know how the game will do to know which part is a limb and which is not, and also know how the bones would be joined together and make them move if our creatures are made of Metaballs.
I think the idea is to have (animation) bones procedurally-generated based on metaball placement. The animations would be procedurally-generated based on the bone placement. Of course, the player would eventually be able to create an endo- or exo-skeleton, which would then determine the locations and constraints for the animation bones. The system would probably have to be more complicated than what was in Spore, due to not having pre-made parts.
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We’ll know when we get there, but for now the basic idea in my head is that any link between metaball and its parent can be marked as a joint and that adds an animation bone there. All metaballs are required to have exactly one parent metaball (except the root metaball) they are attached to for convolution surfaces to work, so leveraging the same system for defining how the creature can move its parts seems like a good idea.
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