I always wondered why cartoons have car animations. It’s a little bit like why don’t we have robots at all. They are such simple machines that you want to do something with them. I’ve thought a lot about this and I’ve come up with a few reasons.
First, there’s no reason we have to show cars moving. Cars are machines, we don’t need a bunch of people running around in circles. They’re easy to animate with simple motion capture.
I’ve seen cars move when they’re in a car or in a car with a window. I don’t know if that’s the case but it seems like theres no one else to talk to these guys.
Second, cars are easy for programmers to create since theyre easy to script. They have really simple animation rules, you just need to be able to tell the car how to move. There are a lot of different ways to make cars move, but you can use a lot of them.
Cars are easy to animate and theres even more complex animations to be used in a lot of different ways. Theres a lot of weird stuff going on in the car that can really mess with the animation.
There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in car animations, but the most common is to use a blend of two animations, and one of these is the car’s forward motion. That’s what all the cars in the game are doing, just a little bit behind the wheel.
Car animations are a great example of what can go wrong when trying to apply auto-pilot to something so complicated. Most of the cars in car games are completely independent of the car in question, so when they try to follow the action, they can mess up the animation. If you have a car that moves forward and backwards in one, you can run into problems. If you have a car that rotates in 2D, a lot of the basic animation can break.
So that’s it for this week. Until next time, I’ll be back with more news on the game, and more news on the future of the game and the universe of Arkane’s hit RPG.
As you can see, the news we give out to you guys is pretty much always exciting. As always, you can email us at hello@arkanes.com or comment on the news page.
As a note, we do not want to get you all excited about things until we have an actual release date and some gameplay footage to go along with it. So we will also be having a weekly roundtable on the forums, where we will answer any questions or concerns you may have.