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The Locomotion System has been officially released last Friday concurrent with my presentation of it at Unite 2008. It is available for download at the Unity website:

Go To Locomotion System

From the website:

About
Take a look at how semi-procedural animation can dramatically improve the realism of animated humans and animals.

Full Control of Style
Animators are experts in creating motions with specific styles and personalities. The Locomotion System uses keyframed or motion-captured animations as input and only adjusts them minimally to move the feet correctly in a dynamic and detailed environment.

Full Control of Behavior
Move your character around by any means you desire, be it a CharacterController, a RigidBody, or your own custom movement logic. The Locomotion System simply observes the position, alignment, velocity and rotational velocity of your character and deduces everything from that, along with some raycasts onto the ground.

Details
The Locomotion System automatically blends your keyframed or motion-captured walk and run cycles and then adjusts the movements of the bones in the legs to ensure that the feet step correctly on the ground. The system can adjust animations made for a specific speed and direction on a plain surface to any speed, direction, and curvature, on any surface, including arbitrary steps and slopes.

License
The Locomotion System is available for free commercial and non-commercial use when used in a Unity game.

The full license is included in the package.

Note
The Locomotion System is developed by Rune Skovbo Johansen in collaboration with Unity Technologies.

The presentation of the Locomotion System at Unite 2008 was received very well judging from the number of times the audience burst spontaneously into applause, and this Gamasutra article refers to the presentation as a "crowd favorite". I'll let you know when the video of the presentation is online.

If you are a Unity user and have any technical questions regarding the Locomotion System, please ask them on the Unity forums so more people can benefit from the questions and answers (and maybe notify me by email of your forum post if you want to be sure I see it quickly).

Labels: locomotion, press

Posted by Rune Skovbo Johansen at 11:50 AM   1 Comments

And now for something completely different. Well, slightly different anyway.

In May last year I was Lead Game Programmer on the one-month student game production Flipside. The game has just one level, but it has a unique premise accompanied with a fantastic and crazy artistic style. Read more about it on playflipside.com or get my own angle on it on my website.

It ended up winning of the 12 Independent Games Festival 2008 Student Showcase Awards and we went to GDC in San Francisco to show it off at the IGF booths. (Note that we live across the Atlantic Ocean in Denmark.) We didn't win the Best Student Game Award though.

However, we got a lot of attention. Since a video interview with us have just been put online by Noesis Interactive, I'll use this opportunity to just mention some of the places where Flipside has been in the media.

ModDB.com / Noesis ModTV Interview June 2008 The popular games and modding site ModDB.com features a video interview with Thomas Pilgaard and Rune Skovbo Johansen about the making of FLIPSIDE. Click the image to view the full video interview

Politiken (DK) Section 2, May 15 2008 The daily newspaper Politiken has an almost full page article about the essense of nordic games, and Flipside is used as a prime example, with two big screenshots from the game. Click the image to view the full article

ModCenter.com Interview February 29, 2007 ModCenter, "your one-stop resource for all your game development needs", features an interview with me about the making of Flipside. Open ModCenter interview in a new window

Games for Windows (US & CA) Issue 15, February 2008 US and Canada magazine "Games for Windows - The Official Magazine" has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their February issue. Sorry for the poor quality scan. Click the image to view the full article

PC ZONE (UK) Issue 184, September 2007 UK magazine PC ZONE has a full page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue. PC ZONE is sold in about 40.000 copies monthly. "Flipside is such a highly stylized and impressive mod, with such a simple and original premise, that it almost feels wrong to be playing it for free" Click the image to view the full article

PC ACTION (German) September 2007 German magazine PC ACTION has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue. PC ACTION is sold in about 80.000 copies monthly. "WERTUNG: SEHR GUT" Click the image to view the full article

PC GAMES (German) September 2007 The magazine PC GAMES has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue and they have FLIPSIDE included on their cover DVD. PC GAMES is sold in about 175.000 copies monthly. Click the image to view the full article

ModDB.com June 2007 The popular games and modding site ModDB.com features an article on FLIPSIDE in their REVIEWS section. "The game, quite simply, looks amazing. Everything about it, from the textures that look pasted onto cardboard cut-outs to the manic, false grin on the main character's face, makes FLIPSIDE infinitely more interesting to look at than the standard mods we see these days. When I first flipped the world over to see the darker perception of reality, I literally gasped out loud. It's a magic moment and one that everyone should experience." Click to view the full article: Open ModDB.com review in a new window

Ok, nuff' ego-tripping for now...

Labels: carreer, flipside, press, video

Posted by Rune Skovbo Johansen at 11:13 PM   0 Comments