Work is progressing steadily on our upcoming human characters.
Under the hood, they use the same rig as the Citizen characters; this is going to let us share a lot of work between both sets of characters. And right now, it means everything already "works".
Which is to say that it does look quite janky, as all the animations and poses were made with a very cylindrical, big-headed "sausage man" in mind... but everything already works: walking, running, swimming, jumping, rolling, sitting, height scaling, ledge-grabbing, etc.
This also lets us share animations between differently-proportioned body types easily.
This is just the first step in getting them up and running; their animations will be remade with them in mind, and their animgraph will also most likely split off into a far more simple version.
User Comments
However I think in a release build it may be desirable to try and keep the game running. Lots of frameworks take this approach. Unity... JavaScript... PowerShell (by default).... uh... Visual Basic....
I think it should be ultimately up to the developer. PowerShell and VB let you turn on or off this behavior. It may make sense to add a project setting in s&box for this as well. Maybe for in-development works you want it on (or just break to debugger when an exception is hit, like with .NET programming with VS) and with a published gamemode it's off, since presumably any errors by that point were unanticipated and you should at least try to keep going if at all possible.
Personally I would want to see and fix all errors in my code but I can understand there is situations, especially in production, where you might just want to cross your fingers and try to power through.
Some games can be played adequately without the need to handle every single possible exception in existence
(Examples: solo games that don't need to account for perfect data parity with servers,
Non-critical multiplayer games (ones that don't value online/global competition) in which the gameplay can sometimes be enhanced when things go wrong).
Unhandled exceptions can also set off a cascading effect that not only reveals the exception itself, but what would happen if the exception was allowed to continue (whether good or bad).
Revealing the possibility of further improvement in safeguarding mechanisms in cases where exceptions do occur. Or revealing interesting/creative mechanics that can be exploited to enhance the gameplay rather than stall it.
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