Re:How to Move Doom Characters in WebGL in 50 lines of JS
by Whodi on Friday May 04, 2012 @02:10PM
(#3929581)
This is why Unity3D is so much more of a pleasure to work with than Unreal. Playing a new animation on a skinned mesh really can be as simple as Animation.Crossfade(). With a little creative thinking, power and simplicity don't have to be playing tug-of-war, they can actually complement each other.
Re:How to Move Doom Characters in WebGL in 50 lines of JS
by Impossible on Friday May 04, 2012 @02:27PM
(#3929664)
As opposed to the Unreal equivalent, PlayCustomAnim()? :). There are things that Unity does better than Unreal but animation isn't a great example.
I've been thinking about the old programming saying, "There is no problem that cannot be solved by adding a layer of abstraction, except for having too many layers of abstraction." How many layers is too many? The trends I see are (1) computers keep getting faster; (2) compilers keep getting smarter; and (3) we keep learning how to better design and manage and debug abstraction layers. Which means the number of abstraction layers that is "too many" to solve any given problem is much higher than it used to be. I think a lot of the "check out this neat thing" posts on HN are a product of that -- we can now stand on the shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of giants without things getting too tippy.
What did "var world = tQuery.createWorld().boilerplate().start()" look like back in 1997, when this Quake 2 model was first released? What will it look like in another 15 years?