Swimming and Climbing

Well, it wasn't that simple to implement as I said in previous posts, and it's not because of animations themselves, but the transitions between them. Adding 3-degrees of freedom to swimming animations, while making it look somewhat natural and organic wasn't easy.

It's difficult to show it in a gif without making it absolutely huge in filesize, but here is a short snippet how diving and rising completely changes where the character is heading and how he is rotated while turning.

Of course it lacks fancy effects, splashes and bubbles - but those will be added later, when the essential stuff is taken care of first.

Animations of swimming on the surface aren't so different, because characters don't need to put their snouts above water to breathe... Every character in the game has an environmental protection forcefield crystal (still gotta come up with a good name for it) that provides them with many cool abilities, one of which is breathing gear. So it's like they have snorkel or scuba gear when they go into water. It's important to make underwater exploration a pleasant experience, where you don't have to worry about suffocating horribly...

Climbing is also very important to freely traverse the land, especially when any surface is climbable. With it you can truly choose your own path!

Aside from just adding new animations for swimming and climbing, the overall internal animation system got yet another big rework, throwing all the slag away and leaving only essential features, making it much better for the developer and modder convenience. I'm not going to go into technical details here, but trust me - its awesome by how simple and functional it is!

So what's next? 

First of all, we need to work to add proper weapons to the game. This will require a lot of planning: what types of weapons, how the characters will hold them, how are they operated? 

Melee, ranged, special abilities - all this has to be taken into account and planned ahead, sketched and modeled. There are some plans already made of course, but the decision needs to be made once we see how it looks in the hands of our Hizathri characters (and others too).

Then, after planning the weapon types, we gotta make animations for aiming them, all different for walking, crouching, and swimming movement modes.

And of course, weapons are all good and badass, but they are essentially just one way to interact with the world, the aggressive way. Due to nature of our game it is equally important to make the social and sexual actions as well, giving you the choice and freedom we promised, peaceful and loving interactions are to be added soon as well.

And lastly, all animations shown so far are not exactly final. They all lack polish, but it can be done later when all the features for the next Pre-alpha and Alpha releases are implemented. Later we're going to spend a bit more time on animations and improve them, also it is possible to write cool procedural animation algorithms, which for example will allow tail to collide with the world, or make legs stay on the ground instead of never floating in the air, and let arms tightly grip to the cliffs when climbing.