I've spent a bit of time recently playing with my Perception Neuron mocap system and ensuring its all working well. I have to say I'm very impressed with the system and the accompanying software, they really have done a great job with this.

Before diving headlong into animation production I wanted to ensure I have a good proven pipeline for getting my animations onto my models and into Esenthel.

Having previously experimented with one successful pipeline involving Jimmy Rig to initially rig and provide the animation re-targeting, I decided to look for an alternative application to handle the re-targeting as Jimmy Rig can be prone to instability at times.

I decided to experiment with retargeting some PN mocap data to a pre rigged FUSE character this time using Animeeple. I have to say the results have been very good. Animeeple is very easy to use and appears to produce quality output; re-targeting the animation with ease and all free of charge!

Video below of some 'out of the box' example PN animations on the FUSE character:

Looking very good there.
PS: Sounds like a neat kit.

Very nice video
One small remark: the feet sometimes seem to slide when they're not supposed to. (example at 19 seconds) but that can probably be cleaned out?

nice indeed, there's sometimes some little shaking here and there

Yeah, I've not made any attempt at this point to clean up the mocap data, it was purely an exercise in ensuring I could successfully re-target the animations and establish a working pipeline into Esenthel.

The system seems however to produce pretty clean data most of the time which should reduce the work needed in finalising the animations.

is EE capable of animating fingers ?

havent check much about animation, but i thought i saw something about this right ?

Yes, it fully supports skeletal animation so as long as you have no more than 256 bones in your bone hierarchy then it will animate anything.

I'm not sure if the specific 'in built' Esenthel biped model supports fingers or not as I have never used that preferring to write my own animation manager from the word go.

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An Archer Character recently added to the game:

   

Hello I just wanted to say this is a really asome game your making

I have a question, EKI One v2.7 Configurator, did you make that program to help in esenthel, how did you do that, that program is really asome, I'm trying to do that as well, very nice

Thanks for your kind comments Andrea.

With regard to EKI One, no I didn't write that ... it was written by a company called Artificial Technology in Germany and integrated by me into several game engines including Esenthel. I had some good initial success writing my own AI routines but really needed some good toolsets to aid with complex design and realised it would take me too long to write those.

Unfortunately EKI One is no longer available as the company was bought up by The MASA Group and a lot of its technology incorporated into their product LIFE. You can find details here: MASA Life.

MASA Life is still available but has been designed with an emphasis on military games in mind (as MASA's main market place is real life Military Simulators for some of the worlds Military forces). It certainly is missing some of the functionality I liked in EKI One but does benefit from the use of Behavior Trees which I view as an improvement. It's probably flexible enough to use for other game genres though!

Please note I have never used it so can't recommend it first hand. It would also require integration into Esenthel to be used, as the company don't supply direct support for Esenthel. I suspect an integration SDK is probably available

Hope this helps and good look with your own game design

Thanks for letting me know, and your reply

I recently downloaded the latest version of Esenthel as I was interested in seeing how the game performed in VR. After a fairly lengthy update of my code (I hadn't realised how much had changed in the SDK) I was able to render it to my Vive headset and was pleasantly surprised by the performance, so be it I am currently only placing the camera statically in my game level and viewing with head rotation only. I haven't coded any movement yet.

However, it became obvious that my AI engine lib was not going to link in Visual Studio 2015 due to being an older build with dependencies on an older run time library. As the engine is no longer available and the company long gone it's impossible to get an up to date lib so the AI engine is unusable with the latest version of Esenthel.

As I am interested in doing a smaller VR project I might consider using the later version for that and write my own AI routines ... we will see!

In the meantime it's back to my version 2 build for the continuation of KOS as the AI Engine is too useful to me to abandon at this point and tbh I have all the performance and features I need.

I am taking early retirement at the end of the year so will hopefully have more time to get the game moving again and aim towards getting it to a playable demo.

Will post again when I have moved the game on sufficiently to showcase.

Well the possibility of getting Esenthel Engine to compile in VS2013 is always there with source access, however not sure how much work it will be. but it is one option atleast if there were something which you really wanted.

makes me sad that EKI One was bought by masa life as I am having a hard time finding any up to date info if it is still viable for games(afterall even if a software is targeting military simulation or similar if it has the same features as the first demos Masa Life had it should be just as viable for any project still, but again haven't seen any samples or demos made in the last two years)

I think making it work with VS2013 would be significant amount of trouble, possibly having to manually recompile every single third party library, with potential many obstacles along the way (compiler compatibility issues). I really don't recommend that.

Thanks for the response Zervox and Esenthel

Regarding the 2013 suggestion whilst I hate shutting off possible solutions I agree it would probably take a lot of work with no guarantee of success in the end. I'm not even sure the EKI lib would be any more compatible with 2013 as it was built to work with 2008 but that at least would be easily tested.

It was indeed a shame that EKI One was bought out, but Artificial Technology could no longer survive once the venture capitalists pulled their financial support. Masa at least rescued some of the technology although, in my opinion, threw away some of the more useful functionality such as the ambient system which made EKI One so powerful.

Having more time in front of me I may re-evaluate what's available in the current marketplace to see if there are other solutions, including possibly taking a look at Masa Life in more detail. As you mentioned Zervox the product doesn't look to have been actively marketed or developed in recent years.

I'd suggest atleast trying to contact them and ask for an evaluation kit, for all we know they support everything Eki One did(afterall it is supposed to be collective of functionalities), I am not sure what the ambient system you speak of is so this is an uncertain factor.

but do hope you find somekind of alternative or solution so you can benefit from upgrades in more than just the engine.