Spore Chris Hecker (Spore Animator Programmer) wants examples of broken animations

Judhudson · Jun 18, 2008

Chris Hecker (Spore Animator Programmer) wants examples of broken animations

Chris Hecker, the lead programmer of the Procedural Animation in Spore would like your help. If you visit Chris Hecker’s Spore Page, he wants you to tag your creatures with “breakprocanim” if your creature has broken animation or animation errors. Here is what he has to say:
Hi, comment on me to send MaxisChecker messages. Please tag creatures that animate poorly with ‘breakprocanim’ so we can find them. You don’t need to send them to me, we’ll search the database for the ‘breakprocanim’ tag. Thanks! Chris

Kudos to him for asking the community for help. Hopefully this will solidify the final retail version of Spore when it ships in September.

Source: Gaming Steve

ManagerJosh · Jun 18, 2008

I wonder what's their definition of broken animations

Judhudson · Jun 19, 2008

He posted an update over at Simprograms as well as Gaming Steve:

Hi, thanks for getting the word out! I updated my UseMeForMessages guy to be a little more clear about what we're looking for. I'll quote it here:

"Please tag creatures that animate poorly with 'breakprocanim' so
we can find them. By poorly, I mean popping, limbs buckling,
extreme jerkiness, parts flying off, bad gait, and that sort of
thing...but not intra-creature penetration/clipping/collision,
meaning legs are allowed to go through each other, etc. You don't
need to send them to me or comment on this guy to report them,
we'll search the database for the 'breakprocanim' tag. Thanks!"

The most useful things to report are "the first thing you tried that didn't work", if that makes sense. It's great that players can and do usually work around any wonkiness before they share their creatures, but that makes it hard to see if we missed something that trips people up when they first start out. Obviously anybody trying to break it will be able to do so pretty easily, so those extreme examples aren't as useful unless you find a way that seems nonintuitive (whatever that means for a Spore creature . Some problems have been fixed since the CC code was branched, and we still have fixes in the works for ship, but we won't be able to fix everything, so no promises on a given creature, but the examples definitely help us test.

Advanced bug reporting tips for the highly motivated: If you find a way to break it, try to make the simplest creature that will cause the problem. Save and don't lose the original "repro case" (the creature that reproduces the problem) in case you accidentally fix it and can't get it to break again, but try to take as many parts and limbs and extra stuff off while still having it break, that makes it easier for us to see what's going on. Mention the animation(s) it breaks on (use the names on the tooltips, also the ones in edit mode), or if it's the gaits, mention that. Also, if you can make a small change to the guy and it fixes the problem, note that, and maybe upload and tag the related fixed guy, and name him blah_fixed or whatever and mention him in the comments, and we'll find him. Finally, its really easy to snow us under. You guys outnumber us by a fair margin, so look at the existing breakprocanim creatures and see if there's already an example of the breakage you found, and if you see a "dupe" then don't bother uploading your version unless it's a substantially simpler repro or something. Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's the same failure case, so when in doubt, upload him, but try to dedupe as much as you can so we don't spend too much time deduping. Remember, when it comes to bug reports, it's all about quality instead of quantity, separating signal from noise takes time, and time is running short!

Edit: Oh, and if you can upload a video of the breakage to youtube and put a link in the creature comments, that's incredibly useful as well. Saw a few people doing that already, great idea!

Thanks for helping out, back to the coding,
Chris
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Spore Chris Hecker (Spore Animator Programmer) wants examples of broken animations

Judhudson is a Hi-Tech Redneck

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Spore Chris Hecker (Spore Animator Programmer) wants examples of broken animations

Judhudson is a Hi-Tech Redneck

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Judhudson is a Hi-Tech Redneck

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