Proper 3D NPCs animations

[jamisson2006]

Hello, I'm a user of Quantum Engine for 4 years, I would like to send you suggestions and ideas for a new version of Quantum Engine.

You could add attack and death animations to enemies, just by placing the same 3D model with different animation, for example.

enemy_attack.3d
enemy_death.3d

like this along with the animation of the enemy walking normally

[rmn20]

Sorry, but I'm not interested in working on Quantum anymore. You can implement this feature yourself and leave a pull request to add it.

[jamisson2006]

So you abandoned quantum...?

[jamisson2006]

but if you want to teach me step-by-step how I can use java j2me in eclipse or netbeans for quantum modifications, I would appreciate it.

[JoseskVolpe]

Just letting it documented here.
The picture above is the file structure for Quantum 3D models. Currently, it handles animation by interpolating the subsequent meshes stored in the file.

3 alternatives are:

1 - Create a function that let's Bot load other 3D files dynamically, with other animations, and store in IDLE, MOVE, DEATH and ATTACK variables.
2 - Modify the file structure adding weights and bones after Polygons4V data, a interpreter to load animations from a different file format and rewrite Morphing. This will break animations of games released till the latest current version if their resources are imported in a newer version, converter will also need to be rewritten to convert from a different file format (such as FBX)
3 - Rewrite everything and make a software M3G interpreter. M3G APIs cannot be used for this since some phones doesn't supports it.

I think the best alternative is 2, since 1 will take a lot of memory resources. The alternative 2 will also let us use models packaging in a different way (such as storing a full zombie mesh and a beheaded zombie mesh in a single file so the game will load the beheaded mesh when zombie gets headshoted) and reuse animations across different models, and even make smoother animations. Things will get way better optimized with this one. Alternative 3 will take so much long and there's fewer tools to manage M3G models.

[JoseskVolpe]

Proposal #1 for new 3D Model file format. Since it'll break the old format we could name the new extension as '.q3d', meaning "Quantum 3D". It makes it possible to keep support on the old format (which is better to drop though, due to space management).
The first 1 byte will be used to specify format version, in case we ever have to update it again and guarantee code stability.
Vertex groups and bones data are specified after Polygons4V.

For vertex groups, the name char length is specified on the first byte, the name string is stored in the following bytes of the length specified earlier. "Id" specifies the vertice ID (in order to compress by not listing non-used vertices), "Weight" specifies the vertice's weight percent in a number from 0 to 127.

For bones, "Vertex gid" specifies the vertex ID it applies to, -1 being no vertex. "Parent ID" is the parent bone it's connected to, -1 being root. "Head pos" and "Tail pos" is the absolute X, Y and Z position of the bone.

Reference: https://learnopengl.com/Guest-Articles/2020/Skeletal-Animation

Errata 1: Added "Number of weights" data on Vertex group structure to set the amount of stored weights on a vertex group

[JoseskVolpe]

Proposal #2 for new 3D Model file format reduces file size by making bones part of vertex groups

[JoseskVolpe]

Still not sure about it, but "mat" seems to be related to texture mapping. Also, it's a Short (2-bytes) value in file but the engine only uses 1 byte of it, could be reduced.
@rmn20 ¿How do Quantum handles textures map, am i right mat is part of it?

Edit: "tex" on Plygon3v and Polygon4v receives a byte value from it. Forcing it to be always 0 has no change, textures keeps mapped normally, but forcing any other random value crashes the engine on line 163, HeightComputer.java (commit 1de5859).

[JoseskVolpe]

Still not sure about it, but "mat" seems to be related to texture mapping. Also, it's a Short (2-bytes) value in file but the engine only uses 1 byte of it, could be reduced. @rmn20 ¿How do Quantum handles textures map, am i right mat is part of it?

Found it, it's au, av, bu, bv, cu, cv, du and dv (¿mat is for shading?). "u" seems to be for X and "v" to be Y position in the texture map.

[rmn20]

mat is a material/texture index.
You can specify material/textures list in level txt file.