With our music system, we want the music to follow the game action. The game has different musical moments and each moment has its own sets of tracks (recorded by Tim) and sets of rules defining which tracks should be played (defined by Dave). This particular moment is called Elk Showdown, when the Elk decides to fight back the Wolf (and it has its reasons to do that :).

Dave set specific rules to begin and end each moment. In this case, the game enters the Elk Showdown moment when the Elk intention to fight back is detected from its AI system.

While the game is inside this musical moment, I am constantly checking the variables that matter for this set of rules, which represent different actions inside the game. When one of these rules is met, I switch the tracks to match the game action.

For example: when the Wolf is moving or idle, the music will match that. When it approaches the Elk, the music matches that too.

The game variables I check come from different game systems, mostly already created by Tommi. For the Showdown music, we are basically checking distances (Wolf to Elk and mate, if present, to Elk), activity level (idle or moving), damage (done and taken) and the Elk AI.

This new music system is another part of the game update built from the gathering of different people’s efforts.

Someone is Getting Coal from Santa this Year

Can I Have That To Go?

Cougars Swipe Left

Eternal First Dater

Great Game Name

Pack the Knife

Middle School Blues

Too Busy

Reported!!

And Into the Fire

Problem Solving Clan

The Eagle Has Not Landed

Insult #1

Insult #2

Insult #3

Death is Cheap

When Your Pack Lacks a Certain “je ne sais quoi”

Slaves Needed

A Wolf in Cat's Clothing

Finally Got a Sitter!

Creating Work for Therapists

Are Wolves Even Allowed on the Couch?

We All Need That, Sister

When Your Wolf Hunts and Pecks

You may have guessed it but this was harder than you'd think. There's a reason why computer games generally steer clear of hand-to-hand physical struggle such as wrestling, in favor of quick punches and swings of a sword, or better yet, safe shooting from a distance. With those, you don't need to worry too much about matching the body movements of the two combatants beyond being kind of in the general area of each other. But we wanted to have those teeth really bite into the other wolf and make it look good. To achieve this, we needed to use several methods together:

1) Inverse Kinematics
This is the technical term for when, after applying animation, a character's body is modified to better match its environment. The classic example is walking on stairs. A standard walking animation is made for flat land, so using that, as is, on stairs looks bad. So IK is used to lift a foot (or lower the other) to match the stair it's standing on.

We use Inverse Kinematics for various things, but in case of fighting, the interesting part is IK on the jaws. As you bite into an opponent, and it struggles, your teeth follow the animated bones of the opponent, creating a seamless contact without having to animate everything in sync. Unfortunately, our IK solution, Final IK, has no standard solution for biting, so we had to come up with our own, and it's pretty delicate to get working right when biting different bite points of different animals of different sizes, while they're playing different struggle animations. But I think we've got most of the oddness sorted out.

2) Bite Points
Because of the reasons described above, it would be quite difficult to make it possible to bite any arbitrary place in a body. And it also happens that in reality, some parts are simply better to bite than others. So we defined a number of Bite Points for each animal, 6-8 per animal. We had to carefully choose and position them to match our animations — if the bite point is, say, too much higher than the animation assumes, the IK is pushed past its limits and looks stretched and distorted.

Another fun little problem was determining how the Bite Point gets chosen when you attack. On the surface, it's simply based on the angle between the attacker and the defender - the closest Bite Point more or less. But should you get the neck only if you attack directly from the front — say, with a 20-degree tolerance — or should you be able to attack it from the side as well? We ended up giving it a fairly wide range, but that means a smaller range for other bite points. And what if the defender spins around just as you're about to bite?

3) Attacker placement
Once we know which Bite Point we'll bite into, we need to determine where the attacker's body is going to be. It would seem obvious - wherever it was when the bite started. But, you guessed it, that may not look good. If you're, say, coming from the front of your opponent, but the Bite Point has been set up so the wolf will bite towards the right, the head will end up awkwardly twisted. So we had to define angle limits for each Bite Point, within which it looks at the very least OK, and then shift the body there if needed. Somewhat clumsy but hidden well enough by the animations and the hectic nature of the melee.

And then we also need to keep the wolf's pivot at the right distance from the Bite Point, so as the opponent — and with it, the Bite Point — moves around, the IK doesn't end up stretched or crumbled up. So the attacker tends to move back and forth and sideways in sync with the Bite Point, again hidden away by the animations.