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Comment by monkeyelite | Hacker News Reader

> inverse kinematics and animation blending

Either this is a central feature of your game, and writing it is worth it. Or it’s a technical boondoggle, and you don’t need it.

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Heh, I contribute to a FOSS social vr project called https://github.com/v-sekai and the majority of the multi year effort was asset pipeline, ik and animation blending. Yes we donated the code to Godot Engine but we choose working on the tooling problem rather than the game… The V-Sekai game is in limbo / not a game. We made godot-vrm which does 3d avatars, with basic animations, look at, jiggle and copy constraints. Since we’re unable to use the unity ecosystem’s finalik or unreal engine’s control rig we have to code to the same level of professional quality with no budget. Features like stable multi-joint y-branching rotation and position constraints are hard. Feel free to chat in V-Sekai discord. I’m iFire.

Using Godot for my big project, thank you for donating the IK stuff to godot!

This is table stakes for any 3D animation, these days. Anim pop is embarrassing and almost certainly you'll want look IK let alone any of the more complex usage.

> This is table stakes for any 3D animation

You’re doing 3d skeletal animation for your indie game? How many skeletons and animations are you going to make?

And you don’t consider it a central feature?

If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them. If you don't want to make a lot of animations you're probably going to want to use IK for procedural animation.

If you use an engine, you won't be forced to spend time and make it a defacto central feature (because you wont have time for other features). You'll just have access to it.

Evan a 2.5D platformer, a common indie genre, would want animation blending and foot IK without innovating on it.

> If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them.

Yes, if 3d skeletal animation is a central feature of your game it’s not a big deal to spend time making a good system that works for you.

> you're probably going to want to use IK

Plenty of 3D games with 3d animation don’t have IK

> for procedural animation.

Wow your game has 3d procedural animation! That better be the main feature right?

The reason I’m so skeptical is a feature has cost whether it’s written in the engine you use or not. You have to do work to make your content look good for IK, and for an indie games that’s critical resources to invest in that.

For most games, spending time tweaking rigs for IK is not going to make your product better.

> You have to do work to make your content look good for IK, and for an indie games that’s critical resources to invest in that.

This is the entire point of using an engine. You can spend time on the content instead of coding features that aren't unique. Suddenly many types of content are far less costly.

I’m saying the real cost is the content.

It’s not hard to implement any of these features, you just don’t have time to do them all.

I agree an engine can be a good prototyping tool.

It's just so wrong. These things are very standardized, and you often just want the common implementation that everyone is using. Writing these in most cases is like writing your own SHA256.

Is your indie game more complex than quake 3?

Blatantly false dichotomy.

Or You simply aren’t ruthless enough about how much time you have on an indie project.

Or those features can be nice-to-haves that are worth it if they're not too much effort, such as if, say, I don't know, an engine handles them for you. Come on, real life rarely justifies such easy, simple decisions. And polish can matter a lot for games.

Sure I’m expressing a value judgment, a design preference - not an eternal truth. And the principle is I want to spent the effort on the most important features in which case it’s not a big deal to write them. Your best features become better than if they were cobbled together in Unity.

That is, to be generous, a rather extreme and niche value judgement that corresponds to no utility I can think of. Real life has a spectrum of "important features" and a corresponding spectrum of justified effort. If that's your idea of artistic integrity, then you do you, but for anyone else it's probably nonsense.

> to be generous, a rather extreme and niche value judgement that corresponds to no utility I can think of

Ok, well I look forward to seeing your games then, as I’m sure you’re skilled at shipping.

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