We decided we wanted to try motion-capturing the marine animations in NS2 because there are tons of them to make and because they are very time-consuming to create (because the human eye is so familiar with how humans move). Colin Knueppel is one of two animators on NS2 and has done motion-capture before (unlike the rest of us). He wrote up with this set of guidelines to help us get started. We thought this might be helpful for other game developers and interesting for everyone.

Check with the mocap studio

Motion capture most often uses a myriad of cameras to catch reflective balls sticky taped or velcroed to an actor's body. If you bring something similarly reflective.. well, it can cause issues. Discuss what you'd like to bring with you to the studio with the studio. Ask them what you can do to minimize any conflicts your props may cause.

Have some masking tape

Hopefully they'll have it there, but if they don't, have your own tape. Putting down a target from start to finish helps. We animators can dampen or ramp up motion to make a target move X far or turn Y more, but the closer to the mark they get, the less work we animators will need to do.

Send the actor lots of Marine concept work with notes

The better the actor understands what his character is wearing and what restrictions he may have, the better the performance will be.

Bring the material with you

Unfortunately many actors have been disappointingly unwilling to read material sent to them, preferring to "wing it." Setting aside 45 minutes before you're on the mocap clock with the actor to make sure they understand what they'll be doing is preferable to arguing it out while the machines are running. If you can set aside an afternoon to plan through moves with him or her before the mocap, even better. Inside the mocap studio your on an expensive clock. A parking lot with coworkers to get down the gist of motions is a great start. Getting time with the actor to convey what you learned will cost you the actors wages, but the motion capture session will go many times smoother.

Proper weight

A marine tends to carry something akin to 60 lbs of gear, ammo and armor. Weighting the mocaper down correctly will keep him from doing unrealistic motion, give his foot steps proper weight and dampen the slight dancey tendencies that come with mocapers. It's not their fault, usually. It's human nature. When you don't properly weight a character, the actor often hams it up to "act" bigger or more impressive. It may work on film, but the cruel eye of the motion capture cameras will make every odd mannerism twice as goofy. Ask the motion capture studio what you may be able to use to properly weight the character. A belt with some sand bags attached to it, a shoulder straps with some weights, some ankle or wrist weights. Get or make a well-weighted weapon. Find out if there's a color you should use that wont throw off the capture.

With each of these, we don't necessary want to go realistic but light of realistic. Ask the actor what he'd be comfortable with. Test it ahead of time when practicing with the actor, if you can.

Recoil

An innovative approach to motion capture was tested by my lead at Bioware, Shane Welbourn, and it worked fairly well. Gun recoil comes from the gun, not the marine shrugging spasticaly. When the actor is "firing" have someone strike the rifle's end. This makes the motion driven by the gun, not by muscle contractions in the actor.

Make it as realistic as you can

Ultimately the less the actor has to guess, the more realistic the motion will likely be. If you can restrict his spine movement, he'll compensate for the marine's rigid outfit. If you tape a mocap friendly ruler to his forearm, he wont have to guess where the pad will be. If you give him a nicely weighted weapon that's approximately the right size, he'll wield it right.

Experience

Find someone that has "been" what you want to mocap. Finding an actor who was a marine, he'll bring his experience to the session. When you get someone that isn't familiar with appropriate motions, they sometimes bring their other non-related experiences to play. We had a martial artist being dual-booked for our sci-fi game that could not, if his life depended on it, make a kick that didn't go at least a foot and a half off the ground by the time it was finished. That flourish took hours of animation and creative camera work to tone down.

Getting an appropriately experienced actor is not without pitfalls. Sometimes what actual marines do is less interesting then what we think they do, and even a hardened marine can come across with oddly consistent emotional gestures. Meeting the actor is a good way to pick up on problematic gestures, and practicing and discussing the moves ahead of time is a good way to avoid uninteresting motions.

Do what looks right, not what is right

This is a huge, but sadly not well known, rule of animation. The human mind has expectations, some of which are not always true. When confronted with whether to do what looks right or what is right, always go with what looks right, because an audience is not going to have the benefit of an explanation. They will cock their head and say, "that's odd." We want to keep the player in the game focused, not educate them.

We hope you found this interesting and helpful and we're hoping to share with you some footage of our motion-capture session!

Hello everyone!

If you have followed our forums and development diary you probably already know that we're busy with the testing of the new update. However, we have saved some news for a feature that has just been published in HalfLife2.net. The feature includes a few extra details about the upcoming update and the progress on Beta 3, with some exclusive screenshots and an interview.

Among some of the exclusive content you can check out there, we have new images of the updated sights of the M4 w/Aimpoint and the completely redesigned FNFAL, some extra images of some of our revamped models (trucks, cars), concept art of the player models of Beta 3 (Insurgent and Serbian), and a couple of in-game screenshots of Beta 3.

We hope you enjoy the feature and we're looking forward to bringing you news about the upcoming update soon. Remember you can check still check our daily progress here.

Updates to Counter-Strike: Source have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Engine

• Fixed an exploit that allowed files to be uploaded to the server at arbitrary locations in the file system


• Fixed a server crash caused by a client packet claiming to be an HLTV client when HLTV is disabled on the server


• Fixed a server crash caused by spoofing a client disconnect message


• Fixed a server crash caused by sending malformed reliable subchannel data

Counter-Strike: Source

• Novint Falcon support is now enabled by default

Firstly, we would like to apologise for the lateness of our release. Due to people joining the mod, then either not doing anything, or leaving almost the next day, or waiting until they have our SVN details and have downloaded the mod, we have not been able to get that much done since the last time we posted. Now, these can be called excuses, but with the world economic downturn, people looking for work, family and a plethora of other better reason not to work on the mod, only minor work has been achieved.

Also, in the last week, I handed in my resignation as the mod lead, due to having a major back operation, and now an umbilical hernia, my heart is no longer in the mod, nor is the rest of my body from what I just told you... lol... But, with the release of this media, and the constructive discussions in the dev section of the mod after my announcement, this might be the best thing for the mod.

While you are making all of those "arrrhh, tisk, phoofy" sounds, here are some pics and 1 video of the work that 'has' been done.




Star Trek: Enterprise - TCW Mod for Half-Life 2 Captains Log - Dry Dock video - Mod DB
Oh, David has been fervently coding and moving the mod over to the Orange Box version of the Source Engine, but this might be something to put on hold, since I heard a rumour the mod may be shifting to the Cry2 Engine. Crysis? Hmmm... Food for thought...

Anyone who is an experienced mod leader, has at least twice as much talent as I have and is dedicated to see a project through, and is willing to work with a very talented Design Crew, post your details in the recruitment section of the forum!

Why Should I Play
Research and Development
Half-Life 2 set the bar for physics based puzzles and few have come close to taking the crown, until now that is. Research and Development is all about unarmed violent mayhem with all combat and puzzles being solved using the environment, your trusty zero-point energy field manipulator and a little bit of common sense, the fantastic use of props and the havok system lead to some very interesting sequences that very few mods of the genre seem to include. Gravity is indeed a very powerful tool and RnD makes great use of it with weight, motion and buoyancy being at the core of most solutions for the problems at hand, with a few interesting extras thrown in for good measure.

It turns out that your standard first person problem solving really does go out the window in this mod, anyone who is familiar with the Half-Life type puzzles would know of the old electrified cable on a puddle of water or using empty barrels under metal platforms to make them float will have quite a shock stepping into RnD. One part that had myself stumped for a few minutes had one of the most obvious answers. When faced with a padlocked door within vanilla HL2 the player will naturally shoot the padlock, it's always the first thing that will come to mind but RnD does not have any weapons to speak of so what would you do exactly? Pick up a gas tank and swing it at the padlock! Such a logical solution to such a simple puzzle was quite a different thought process for me and it only got better from that point onwards.

I'm not the type of person who enjoys sitting down and spending time for what is simply a Half-Life 2 map pack, most will need more than just a few kill rooms to tickle my fancy, but RnD does a fantastic job of putting the focus off combat and taking what Half-Life 2 promised from the beginning and delivering just that. Research and Development is definitely worthy of any Half-Life fans itching to get a bit more action, just without the crowbar.

Type: Single Player
Run Time: 2 Hours
File Size: 54.57 MB
Difficulty: Medium

We are beginning the launch of the new website. However, there are still a few bugs and kinks that need to be worked out, as well as new features being implemented daily!

Please report all bugs retaining to the site to:

james.read.18@gmail.com (Web Developer), or one of the other developers on our public IRC channel located at:

irc.gamesurge.net / #orion-project.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience!

Mosey on over to ModDB this morning and you'll find two video interviews on the front page, where myself and Laura wax lyrical about Jailbreak: Source 0.6, modding, the future of Jailbreak, inspirations and other fascinating facts. Alternatively, if you're lazy, you can just click the play button below!


It's worth noting that the interviews were both conducted several months ago, and significant progress towards finishing 0.6 has been made since.

Big, big thanks to Noesis Interactive for seeking us out and organising the whole thing, and doing an absolutely superb job of editing it!

Hello, and welcome to Firearms: Source's first news post of August. The first thing I would like to go over with you all are a few weapon polishings. The SR25 was originally donated to us by the World at War development team, but has been recently remade by our own developers. The Stoner Rifle, textured by DrHubbler, serves a unique role in the FA:S world. It's semi-automatic fire allows for efficient mid-range combat, but the weapon itself excels at long distances with its high power Leupold scope. It has a magazine capacity of 10 rounds, and comes in at 18 credits.

Next, we have the M1911, which has been re-textured by DrHubbler to ensure that the weapons you will be firing in FA:S consist of highest quality of work. The M1911 was brought over to Firearms: Source after the merger with Fireteam Incursion and was modeled by SiD. The M1911 is our least expensive weapon, 2 credits, but don't let the price fool you. This classic firearm has more bang for the buck than you can imagine with its .45 ACP round. Next time you have 2 extra credits and you are about to reach for the grenades, you may need to rethink your decision and grab the M1911 to help you finish the job. Now you all may be wondering, "what are these nut-jobs doing recreating weapons when we don't even have the game yet?" We assure you that all of their previous duties are already completed, so they are merely doing clean up duty. They are also busy going through our materials directory and making sure we are being as efficient as possible with our texture memory. The M1911 was previously using more space than needed, which is why it was a prime candidate for a make over, along with the fact that it's texture "needed more cowbell."

Finally, to show you the other areas where development has been taken place, you can go over to Undertone's Developer Journal and check out the latest work he has done on his maps. You can see his updates to PS_Sand, SD_Mine, and his latest TC_Greenstone. There has also been a recent update to the website. We removed the Latest Media box, because we felt it was redundant, since we have a full front page devoted to the latest media. We also removed the Latest Video, because the latest video we had was really outdated and we felt its about time we get to work on a new one. So in the meantime, I have added a Facebook script that allows users who don't have Twitter or Facebook, see the latest Twitter/Facebook messages that our developers have posted in the feed. On a final note, if you are bored, please drop by our IRC channel at #firearms-source @ irc.gamesurge.net. We will be happy to entertain you!

As the fourth part in our alien "reveals", we give to you, the Gorge!

Concept

The Gorge probably has the most character of any of the aliens and we knew we wanted to preserve is his slightly pitiful, hard-working and heavyset character (never say fat, it's rude).

Being the main builder/healer class and without much offensive power, we thought his pudgy visage needn't say "I want to eat you" but instead, "No one appreciates my slime-piles". Hence, the defeated look of his half-closed eyes. His semi-awkward face armor implies that he needs to stay safe more than he needs to attack fast-moving targets and the upturned armor "ears"...well, they're just cute.

His glowing spare tire ties him into the hive somewhat, in that both play a key role in the team's abilities and advancement. Here's the finished model and texture in-game:

Here's a video showing him in all his swollen glory:

Spit

As in NS1, the Gorge can spit a projectile that does damage to marines and structures. It makes a sizzling sound on enemies and glows, doing damage over time. It also obscures marine players' screens a bit and slows marine movement for a short time. It shows up as a bumpy infestation on its target. Spit alt-fire is a shorter-range, slower speed, more potent version especially suited for structures.

Health Spray

We're keeping the healing spray from NS1 as well. This creates a cloud of healing bacteria that will heal all friendly players and structures within it. Using this he'll be able to keep his teammates and precious structures alive and healthy. The area effect also means he won't have to move his corpulence unnecessarily.

Damage Soak

One new ability we're giving the Gorge is a armored protection ability (name pending). By holding crouch, he can drop his cushy paunch to the ground, extend the armor plates on his back. Doing so will mean that he takes damage off his energy instead of health, as long as he can do so! Energy is like the equivalent of alien ammo, but it never runs out and is always replenishing itself. So if he goes immobile, he can soak quite a bit of damage without getting hurt. At some point though, he'll run out of energy and he'll need to be saved by other players or will need to get up and shuffle away. You can see this ability at 0:32 in the Gorge video.

Geeky gamedom anecdote: if you played the celestial Star Control ][, you'll recognize this ability as similar to Utwig's special ability. We are toying with having the ability give you energy when it soaks damage as well, and reducing energy when using it without actually taking damage. I think it could an interesting Yomi layer.

Chambers

Chambers and how they relate to alien upgrades represent the weightiest change for the Gorge in NS2. Now there is an Alien Commander building technology structures, so Gorge-created structures won't unlock upgrades or abilities for other players. The unctuous chambers that the Gorge spits up will be purely tactical. These include the familiar Defense Chamber (automatically heals players or structures nearby) and the Offense Chamber (a kind of organic turret that shoots spikes, possibly renamed to Spike Plant). His overabundance...of abilities mean we'll probably limit his structures to these two.

One last ability we're considering is one suggested by the community - by holding shift he could Belly Slide along slick or downhill surfaces. Maybe as a quick escape down a ramp or just for fun?

We're hoping that these abilities will make the Gorge a fun class that straddles the line between attacker and defender and gives him lots to do near combat and in alien bases. He'll never be much of an attacker, but this butterball is the team medic and engineer and thus, deserves to be loved (by anything with slime on it at least).

Next up is the Lerk!

This is too much to write for a tweet so I thought I'd write a micro-blog update about modding in NS2 in response to this e-mail:

"Would it be possible with a "bodycount" mod or mode in NS2 where bodies of the fallen remain in place? Possibly they can be removed by consumption by aliens and the infestation (extra res) or disassembled by the welder (also extra res). Would be cool to stand in a corridor on a pile of aliens and hammer away ye ole' 'chinegun. It would add an extra dimension in blockage though. -Daniel V."

Cool idea. The awesome thing about the tools and our modding setup for NS2 is that this would be really easy. I think it would be no more than a couple dozen lines of Lua (which is a pretty simple language) and possibly a couple particle effects which you can build visually using our Cinematic Editor. 99% of the NS2 game code is written in Lua and we will be releasing it all with the game. So you can change the resource model when welding alien carcasses, disable the fade away time, etc.

Of course, mod code will all auto-download and won't muck up your install so you can always play "vanilla" whenever you want. We think NS2 is going to have the most creative and prolific mod community ever!