Interview by Gamespot with Robin Walker 09/11/00:
| GS:
Can you give us an example of a situation where Parametric
Animation rules over an older technology?
RW: Sure. The main thing Parametric Animation allows you to do is to show a greater range of states, of other players around you. So imagine at anytime in the game, a player has a number of states. So, in an older FPS (First-Person Shooter game) I'm running along, say I'm strafing to my right, there's an enemy in front and I'm reloading, or something like that. Now in older technology you were forced to make decisions about what animation states you had to show to the players. So you're over there and you're watching me. And what you see depends on what the game considers important. If it thinks shooting is really important, you'll see me play a firing animation. Maybe they have firing animations that are created with a strafe, so you'll see me strafing and firing. But an artist had to create a firing standing, firing strafing left, firing strafing right animations. All of that. It becomes a lot of work. Then maybe if you wanted to see me reloading, the artist had to create reloading while running, reloading while strafing, maybe I'm jumping at the same time, so you have to get strafing, jumping, reloading. All of that stuff. Parametric Animation allows our artists to create every one of these things once, and we blend them all together. So if I'm strafing one way, shooting another way, reloading and jumping at the same time, the animations just all blend together. And the end result is we get extremely lifelike animations. So that's one thing you we get increased states. The other thing you get is that bodies move far more nicely. An example is that we don't actually take four animations and blend them. In Half-Life, for example we did a sort of semi-step up for the animation. We allowed the player's waist to be decoupled from his torso so you could run left and right, and your upper body could do things. With Parametric, we get a step over that which allows us to do whole-body blends. So that when I look up and down it's not my torso swivelling, my whole body shifts. If I turn and I'm running this way, my weight shifts on my legs, and my arms move. The whole body moves as it should. And its interesting, but it does make the game a lot more appealing to people who don't play FPS's normally. The players move as they should. They find it very strange when they watch a game and they watch a guy running forward, moving right. It seems very strange to them.
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