🚀 go-pugleaf

Some of you might have already seen this video but for those of you
who haven't, I think it's a neat look at one of the underpinnings of
modern game design: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul0Gilv5wvY

It is a tech-demo of a company's - Method Studio - latest iteration of
its middleware animation engine. Now, while I can't speak for the
technology itself, the end result is merely an evolutionary step -
rather than a revolutionary one - over current animation; it looks
better, but not incredibly better. So in and of itself, it's nothing
more than a preview of "things to come" in the next few years.

But I did like how it shed some light on how animations work. The last
time I looked into this area was, well... honestly, it was in the
Quake-era, when characters had canned animations specifically
triggered by the developer in response to certain inputs. This video
made me aware of how the technology has evolved, and how much of the
animation is created and blended procedurally these days. There is
still a lot of motion-capture and hand-crafted animations created by
the artists, but choosing when to trigger them getting them to
naturally flow into one another - which is basically what this
middle-ware does - is all handled by the computer on-the-fly. Learning
that made watching what is, essentially, a five-minute advertisement
worth it and I think if you have any interest in the subject you might
enjoy the video too.