Walking Ninjas

I would like to take a second to talk about a pet peeve I’ve always had with 3d games, and it’s something that I still see in modern games like Fallout: New Vegas (and probably MANY more).

What I’m talking about is when a character walks but their feet don’t make frictional contact with the ground, instead, their feet slide in relation to the ground when they walk. I hate that.

Here’s a rough overview of how to fix it:

Pick a bone to be fixed in the scene. I usually go with the lowest foot. Next, perform a frame of animation and see how much that bone moved. Translate the character the opposite of this bone’s movement, moving the player and leaving the bone fixed in the scene.

Here’s a video showing off the walking, with spheres drawn at the fixed bone. It’s MJPEG. (the low FPS is because I’m using the app itself to dump its screen contents).

I have a demo of this with my framework here (binaries and source). I spent a lot of time revamping my framework; others should be able to build it now. The code of interest is in CNinja::doFrame(). You can also enable the feet balls in CNinja::Spawn().