I’ve just found out I’ve got a Blog. And I’m supposed to write something in it. I could start by telling you about myself, but I won’t. Instead I’ll just jump straight into what I’ve been up to this week in the Fable tools department.

This week was milestone week. Meaning I spent most of the week in continuous panic about whether or not I was going to get all of my work done on time. I’ve spent far more time in this office than is healthy and I’m really beginning to feel it.

First amongst my tasks was a bit of a monster. The animators (and others) required a way to preview paired animations in the editor before they went into the game. A paired animation is two animations each running on one of two separate characters with some pre-determined offset from each other. Not too bad you say. Except that up till this point, all of the animation previews we’ve got in the editor are on a single character. The entire animation system within the editor assumes that you’ll only be viewing one animation (or animation sequence, or layered animation, or animation bank etc.) at a time. Viewing two characters at the same time doing two different things was something that our system had never taken into account.

Sound difficult? It wasn’t. Our tools code base is pretty powerful and it ended up being pretty easy to have two characters animating in the same window at the same time. The hard part was that the information about how far they should be away from each other was stored in the animation, and there wasn’t any way to get that information out on the tools side.

So I needed to look into the engine. The engine is deep, dark and scary, and I’m sure that all engine programmers are completely insane.

I spent all of last week finding ways NOT to get this information and the first two days of this week finally finding a way to access it.

 Next up was creating a tool for the scripters, allowing them to quickly cycle through alternate random models for the characters in their scripts. Straight forward, no problems.

Then it was off to work on some small UI and workflow improvements to the action tools. The action tools are the tools that let designers take an attack animation, add events to it (such as when the attack can switch to another attack or when it provides an opening to a counter attack) and then make small time based adjustments to the speed of individual parts of the animation such that the end attack is better balanced with other attacks.

Again, straight forward.

Finally, I got to fix a bug that I’d created at the beginning of the week. Remember how there was this big deal about putting two characters into the same animation preview window that turned out not to be a big deal? Well, it turned out that my solution was a little broken. It caused a complication in the 3d paste tool (which is the tool which lets the level editors paste objects at specific points within a level), and likely other areas as well. Seems I’d inadvertently made all objects have two locations, a ‘real’ one and one that was used for ‘secondary’ characters when their animations were being viewed. And the 3d paste tool was using the wrong one. Oops.

Well, objects only have one location again. And that’s another week working on the Fable tools.

-Kalev