Ok; I've looked around a little bit and could not dig up enough to fully answer my questions...

First of all, I'm generating a hack and slash adventure. However, we want hordes of monsters on screen at once.

But, I do want, at least for the main characters, animation combination; So the main characters (4 players playing at once). Are most likely going to need bone animations so they can run and swing swords/fist at the same time.

Now. The actual questions...

For multiple meshes on screen at once, is it better to use vertex animation or bone animation? I'm assuming the textures will all be shared on the video card, however, in bone animation is there extra data created on the video card PER INDIVIDUAL ENTITY? Same with vertex? (I assume vertex animation has all animations already blocked out by keyframe into video ram... but does it do it per entity or per mdl?). So, say I have 15 monsters on screen, will that be less video memory if it's vertex or bone animation? (assuming they are all using animations at different times...).

Bone data would be imported using .fbx files from Maya... (which is better, fbx or .x files in terms of exporting?)...

I was initially under the impression that bone animation used less video ram.. however, the manual said otherwise so I'm unsure of the actual uses for bone animations now other than combining animations to create new ones (run forward shoot to the side... something like that). Or using bone animation in physics simulations (rag dolls?). So... what are the real advantages to using bones?

Does anyone know of a good structure to put animations into? What should an animation manager (in code) contain in order to keep track of states? Any tips in this area would be appreciated (we're developing the game in c++ using acknex.dll, and commercial version, I'm the sole programmer).

Thanks for your time!

Bone positions are indeed stored per individual entity, and can consume several KB of virtual memory dependent on the complexity of the skeleton. This is no problem on today's machines, but can be a problem is you have many entities and target an audience with very old PCs, like Win 98 or Win ME systems with usually 256 MB RAM or less.

Vertex animation does not consume memory.

Bones or vertex animation have no effect on video memory.

Well, some may say. that vertex animations are "olf-fashioned". In fact, they are, but compared to bone animation, they are a lot faster. So, if you are not in the NEED to give your hordes bones animation, vertex animation would be the choice if you are focusing on performance. Otherwise, if you have a lot of animation frames in your model, vertex animated models are most times a lot LARGER than bone animated files. I programmed once a character which had 20-30 animation cycles in one file with about 8-16 frames per cycle - all vertex based. The file really large, just for the animation data (and the character was lowpoly!!). So if you don't want to waste memory, vertex animations are the worser choice (but this depends on vertex count and animation frames!).


Or using bone animation in physics simulations (rag dolls?). You can do this actually.

I will answer the last question regarding animation machines later, if you wish - I'm going to lunch and I'm back in the later afternoon

Quote:

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Vertex animation does not consume memory.

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But what if a vertex animated file is about ~20 MB? Won't it consume 20 MB of memory?

Cheers,
Christian

Well. My player characters have about 400~500frames of animation (possibly 1000 if we go bones) right now. I sampled most of the moves at every other frame (some of the attacks require single frame interpolation). So the characters contain a lot of animations. And I have the feeling that we really need to do more move blending animations so it's likely that it's gonna need to go to 600-700.

However, from what it sounds like, bone animation would probably be the best for the main characters.

As for enemies (non-boss opponents). Non-bones would be the best as they would all be deriving from the same information, instead of creating the same info over and over again for each enemy on the screen (rather than for just the same .mdl file in memory). However, going to have to limit the animations and blending animations together would probably not be the best idea's.

So... for now, what I'm going to do is implement vertex animations for the mobs; with a limited set of animations. And implement the PC's as bone animations with animation combinations for their moves.

Now, hoenstly, I've never implemented a game animation system, so what would be some things to keep in mind in terms of this? Any good resources before I start googling? ^_^;; Thanks!

Also, I thought vertex/bone animation data was stored on the video card. But I guess it's only mesh/texture data then? That definately saves me alot of worry in terms of animations!

Correct, the video card only stores vertices, vertex indices, and textures.

I know this is an old thread so forgive me.

We have a game where every character is vertex animated.

There are a ton of frames for each one, and some of the MDL files are up around 40MB each, with the largest being 108MB. When I load one of the 40MB models into the game it actually ends up consuming several hundred MB of memory. I assume it's because it's decompressing the vertex positions all at once into memory or something similar.

According to this thread, vertex animated characters don't use up memory, but in my experience they certainly do. I've had to put a 2GB minimum RAM requirement on our game because of this. When I have 4 animated characters on screen at once and each of the MDL files is 40MB, the RAM being used (according to the task manager listing for acknex.exe) is over 1GB. Shouldn't it only be 160MB for the models and then about 100MB more for the levels, etc?

Am I doing something wrong?