The New Face of the Thief - a visual AI overhaul

gigagooga on 19/11/2012 at 07:23

yay! maybe we'll finaly see women AI that really look like women (has not actually ever happened in thief universe until now lol)

PinkDot on 19/11/2012 at 11:05

Yep, pretty women in Thief world is what really gets me going in this project. ;)
I think it would require creating a set of motions adjusted for different body proportions, so hands don't cut through the body etc. But if I manage to get animations imported and exported, I should be able to make variations not only for women, but for fat people, old, strong, weak and so on.

The Phantom on 19/11/2012 at 11:06

That's an ambitious project, PinkDot! Hope you can find the help you need. It would be great to see better texturing, more polys and fixed problems for all AI :thumb:

That video is both humurous and beautiful. I remember the library from (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109552) the map you abandoned back in 2006. Now that making something this detailled in dromEd is less of an obstacle, do you expect to finish this project at some point?

EDIT: just found (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXnIDXnXjW8) your old vid with the walking monk.

Shadowspawn on 19/11/2012 at 15:25

Those AI look fantastic! A VERY ambitious project.

You mentioned better joints, animations, etc. One of the huge limits we had in the Dark Engine was pre-compiled torso restrictions. (Well, we guessed they were compiled into the engine, we never found any data in a DLL or library which contained the torsos).

So, we can't add facial animations, individual fingers motions, or in fact any new joints.

Now, I haven't had time to look into 1.19 yet, but maybe that restriction has been lifted? That would be very cool, but also a lot of work to add more joints to existing motions (or to remake a large number of motions).

I have so little time nowadays, I mostly just lurk around TTLG when I can. Long hours at work and long commutes leave too little time for Dromed or Thief. (I haven't played a fan mission in 3 months).

If I can answer any questions, I'll be glad to help.

Ottoj55 on 19/11/2012 at 17:08

those are very nice looking, from my experience with ai models, the shoulders stretch a lot due to the crucified shape of the models when they are built, versus when they drop their arms in game. i also found that the hands holding weapons were just lumps. some original models have very stretched or overlapped texture maps in places, so a refresh is very needed. most ai in new games use a single 1024x1024 map for everything with variety in faces provided on smaller separate maps.

PinkDot on 19/11/2012 at 19:30

Quote Posted by The Phantom

That's an ambitious project, PinkDot! Hope you can find the help you need. (...)

Thanks Phantom. It is ambitious indeed. And that's probably why I have decided to do it. Simple things, with easily forseeable results are beyond my interest, for some reason. :)

Quote:

I remember the library from (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109552) the map you abandoned back in 2006. Now that making something this detailled in dromEd is less of an obstacle, do you expect to finish this project at some point?

Hmm... I'm not sure. First of all - Haplo had used my abandoned missions recently, including the library one. And secondly - the current project will keep me busy enough for a long while, I'd say.
But having said that, I don't say definitive 'No' to dromeding at some stage. The fact that I'm here again after a "strong" decision of not getting back to Thief universe anymore has taught me to be more careful with what I say... :) ;)

Quote Posted by "Shadowspawn"

You mentioned better joints, animations, etc. One of the huge limits we had in the Dark Engine was pre-compiled torso restrictions. (Well, we guessed they were compiled into the engine, we never found any data in a DLL or library which contained the torsos).

So, we can't add facial animations, individual fingers motions, or in fact any new joints.

Could you go into a bit more details on the "pre-compiled torso restrictions"? I definitely don't have as much experience in this topic as you do, but I thought (hoped) that MAP and MJO files are what defines the joint structure.

Quote:

Now, I haven't had time to look into 1.19 yet, but maybe that restriction has been lifted?

To whoever did the 1.19 patch - I hope you're reading this and plan on releasing a next version....! :)

Quote:

If I can answer any questions, I'll be glad to help.

Thanks Shadowspawn! I definitely will have some questions to you. And I already use a lot of your knowledge, which you had shared over years with the Thief community.

Quote Posted by "Ottoj55"

from my experience with ai models, the shoulders stretch a lot due to the crucified shape of the models when they are built, versus when they drop their arms in game.

Yes, that's one of the reasons for sure. If they were at 45 degree, the distortion would be smaller (but those bloody limit planes would be more awkward to work with!). But I believe another thing is the crude vertices weighting. I managed to get more smooth shoulder, but then his armpits looked ridicoulous. I might actually post some screenshots of different versions I came through. Being able to transfer manual weighting from Skin modifier into .bin file should help in that matter.

Quote Posted by "Albert"

Sounds like a great undertaking. My hat's off to you, Pinky.

Cheers! :)

Ottoj55 on 19/11/2012 at 20:14

i'll send you the guards i did, you'll be able to see the improvement in the hands.

Shadowspawn on 19/11/2012 at 20:20

With the pre-compiled torsos, you'd have to go to the base of an AI class, and see what torso is assigned to it. ONLY AI whose joint map (MAP and MJO files) exactly match the torso can be connected to the game. (Really, Dromed has a fit and crashes). If you try and change the torso of a human to Constantine, it gives a warning about the joint map, then usually crashes.

I'm working from memory, but frogs and burricks share the same torso. The Constantine torso is a biped torso with a tail. The spider torso is pretty unique. I believe craymen were just plain bipeds, like most everything else in the game. Guards with swords, Hammerites, and regular humans all use the same joint map. The end of the weapon counts as the RFinger joint, but in an unarmed human, its on the right hand. But they all have the same joint map.

So, I don't know if the torsos were expanded in 1.19. I'll have to try and get a chance to look at it. If there is a way to expand it, then we could add joints to AI and create more motions. If not, we'll be somewhat limited in what we can do. But your project to beautify the AI is still worth doing (and it'll probably be plenty of work in its own right).

On a note to save yourself headaches - I created a bunch of pirate meshes for a mission that never went anywhere. I made sure the faces and hands were mapped to the same texture name, another texture for the body (even if they come from the same texture), and had the weapon mapped to a texture name.
Then I could go in Dromed and remap the textures per AI. So, I could change the faces and hands of all the pirate meshes to any texture which has the face in the same place. (Nice to have standard texture layout).

So, with making one mesh, I had about 20 pirates I could create. Some also had shiny swords, other were rusty. All by simply remapping the texture in Dromed. (I think it's the texture remap function under Renderer - but I can't quite remember).

That could save time if you can arrange the mapping that way.

PinkDot on 20/11/2012 at 17:22

Quote Posted by ="Shadowspawn"

OK, I get what you mean now. BTW. I think there are two ways the term 'torso' is used in Dark Engine - similar but not the same. One, in the MJO file, it referes to joints which have limbs connected to it. For example biped has two torsos - jabdomen and jbutt (names from the top of my head).
But there is also word 'torso' used in the motion data files and it referes to overall joint structure type. (= creature type). I just saw a property in Dromed called Creature Type, which basically has the list of all joint structures, but as you're saying it seems to be hardcoded. I can't see any external file, which Dromed reads this from. So that would be a part that needs some work for the next patch :) - giving Dromed ability to of adding new set of joints.

So it seems like currently there's not much I can do about that. I think I'll stick to the joints structures we have for the time being and do as much as I can with them.

Quote:

So, with making one mesh, I had about 20 pirates I could create.

Yes re-using is the way to go on a massive scale, but I don't know if I want to take such a shortuct in this project. Because of the higher amount of detail in the models, we can't get away easily with having loads of identical models and just swapping textures. I mean we could but it would be a bit of wasting the possibilities, which higher details bring. So even if I re-use the same model for let's say every guard, I will still modify it slightly, so no two models are identical. Especially faces. Then people can create variations of these models and textures for their projects, if they want to.
Also - for the faces I think every one will have to have slightly different UVs. I'm going to use photos as base for the textures, and I find it much easier to adjust UVs to match face features in the texture rather than photoshopping the texture to match UV layout.
But let's see how it goes in practice.

Quote Posted by "Ottoj55"

i'll send you the guards i did, you'll be able to see the improvement in the hands.

Thanks Otto - I'll have a look at them tonight.

LarryG on 20/11/2012 at 18:24

If you want, I can send you my Keeper Elders (T3 style) and skeleton AIs. The Keepers are no great shakes, but The Skeletons aren't half bad, and now that the textures can be high res, the the numbers used can be reduced. Let me know if you want them.