Behind the Scenes of Messiah’s Character Animation System

This article is not a how-to guide, it’s a brain dump from the perspective of the engine programmer (me) of Shiny’s upcoming title, Messiah. Usually Game Developer articles are littered with formulas, graphs, and code listings that serve to up the intellectual profile of the piece. However, I’m not a mathematician and I don’t feel the need to state any information in the form of a graph — in this article I describe problems, solutions, and things I’ve learned in general terms, and that allows me to cover a lot more ground.

My interest in character systems started more than four years ago, when I was working at Scavenger, a now-defunct development studio. I was assigned to develop a "next-generation" X-Men game for the Sega Saturn. Sega wanted motion-captured characters and chose to use pre-rendered sprites to represent them. I observed the planning of the motion-capture sessions, examined the raw mo-cap data that these sessions generated, saw it applied to high-resolution characters on SGIs, and then received the frames which I was to integrate into the game.

The results were disappointing. The motion-capture data, which could have driven characters at 60 frames per second (FPS), was reduced to little bursts of looping animation running at12 to 15 FPS, and could only be seen from four angles at most. The characters were reduced to only 80 to 100 pixels high, and still I still had problems fitting them in memory. The models we spent weeks creating came out as fuzzy, blurry sprites.

Around that time, two new modelers, Darran and Mike, were hired for my team (and the three of us still work together at Shiny). These two talented modelers wanted to create the best-looking characters possible, but we didn’t know how to justify the time spent on modeling super-sharp characters when the resulting sprites came out looking average at best.

Eventually, Sega Software stopped developing first-party games and X-Men was canned. Soon thereafter we were asked to develop our own game. That provided me with the incentive to figure out how to represent characters in a game better. We knew we wanted at least ten or more characters on the screen simultaneously, but all the low-resolution polygonal characters we had seen just didn’t cut it. So I decided to keep pursuing a solution based on what I had been working on for X-Men, hoping that I’d come up with something that would eventually yield better results.

At first I flirted with a voxel-like solution, and developed a character system which was shown at E3 in 1996 in a game called Terminus. This system allowed a player to see characters from any angle rotating around one axis, which solved a basic problem inherent to sprite-based systems. Still, you couldn’t see the character from any angle, and while everybody liked the look of the "sprite from any angle" solution, many people wanted to get a closer look at the characters’ faces. This caused the whole voxel idea to fall apart. Any attempt to zoom in on characters made the lack of detail in the voxel routine obvious to people, and the computation time shot up (just try to get a character close-up in West-wood’s Blade Runner and you’ll see what I mean). I tried a million different ways to fix the detail problem, but I was never satisfied. The other problem with a voxel-based engine was the absence of a real-time skeletal deformation system. Rotating every visible point on the surface of a character in relation to a bone beneath the surface was not a viable solution, so we had to pre-store frames and again, as in X-Men, cut down in the playback speed and resolution. At that point I was ready to try a different solution.

When my team and I were hired by Shiny a little less than two-and-a-half years ago, I had done the prototype of a new character system after leaving Scavenger. Shiny was really excited about it and I continued to develop the system for the game that would eventually become Messiah. Let’s look at that system and examine the solutions I came up with.