Courses

This course discusses the practical challenges in creating the animation system for Destiny plus solutions, lessons learned, and future development. 
Bungie's upcoming title Destiny is a multi-player persistent-world action game that requires responsive character animation as a foundation for core game play. The course summarizes how that goal was achieved in Bungie's new game engine, emphasizing interaction with the networking model and distributed AI, under a tight CPU budget and memory constraints. Topics include:

• Integrating dynamic-object-update time slicing, performance gained. and challenges encountered.

• How research-project solutions for locomotion evolved to suit the constraints and needs of a practical game pipeline.

• Examples of Destiny’s character-action features.

• Content workflows and improvements in data specifications and verifications that delivered a more robust and efficient system.

This in-depth presentation of real-world problems will help researchers and game engineers avoid mistakes and achieve better systems in less time.

Course Schedule

2 pm
Introduction/Overview
Lee

2:10 pm
Design Goals and Constraints
Spataro

2:40 pm
Action System
Armstrong

3:20 pm
Runtime Rig and Animation Layers
Armstrong and Spataro

4 pm
Networking Models for Animation
Lee

4:20 pm
Performance Challenges
Lee

4:40 pm
SIGGRAPH Publication to Games
Lee

5 pm
Conclusion and Future Work