Ideas for communication

[Brainz]

well... in DoD, the hand signs are sent to the chat area, as well as being animated, so you get:
Brainz (Handsignal): Go Go Go!

AFAICT it only sends to teammates with LOS, even if they're not looking at you. And for the sort of situation described by Soul IRL, you'd use either radio, or shout. Hand signals are only used when stealth or long distance LOS communication is needed.

[SoUlFaThEr]

anyways sound files are cheaper on space than animations

[sPlOrYgOn]

actually I think a few animation codes would be smaller than loading a sound file.. but I think I agree to combine sound and motion..
makes it seem more real like..

[sfx1999]

Originally Posted by SoUlFaThEr

anyways sound files are cheaper on space than animations

That depends. Are you using key frame or skeletal animation? How many polygons are on the model? Also, how long is the sound file?

If you are using skeletal animation, it would most likely take up less space. I don't know about key frame animation. It would depend on the number of points and the number of frames. For example, 20 frames*800 points=16,000 bytes. It would be even higher since you had to store headers, frame information, and vertex grouping information (for accurate interpolation). Also, you might not be using bytes, increasing the size. This size could be compressed, though, by only moving what changes and gzipping the data.

[SoUlFaThEr]

im not using anythingat the monet so i cant answer of course

[V or 'Tex]

Actually, if you had a very good skeleton with many bones, all you'd have to do is give X joint move to XYZ where XYZ is the origin of the model, wherever that is.

So in all, it could be a very minor amount of data.

If you have ~64 joints (quite a few, for a model) you can store it as 6 to 7 bits (or just a byte if you want to round it off and support 'higher res' models) then you do each xyz as a few bytes. 2 or 3 ought to do it, after all if you do 3 bytes you get 16,777,216 points along each axis.

So assume you use 2 bytes (65536 points along each axis)

A hand signal could consist of:
[2 bytes for 'transition time' for each joing][1 byte reference to joint][2 bytes of X][2 bytes of Y][2 bytes of Z]

So all in all, you've got very, very little data. And you can use multiple bone references between each transition time by specifying transition time as having extra bits, or using indicators at the beginning of each 'frame' or what-not.

Sound on the other hand is more complicated.

[Brainz]

that only moves one joint tho. To give a 'go go go' signal, more than one movement is needed. Three, minimum:
Prepare (get hand into position), perform and recover (put hand back to weapon), and lets not forget that most human motions are actually viariations on a number of combined circles, which take more work than a simple straight line.

Sounds: how many different ways are there of playing a sound? (don't answer that, its rhetorical...) All you need is to trigger all users to play the sound, with a volume equal to k/d^2 where k is a (sound specific?) constant, and d the distance to the speaker, with a minimum values below which the sound is not played. That surely is just a "for..next" loop, and an if statement calling, for eg, WMP. Am I missing something, or is sound simpler than anims?

But IMO the player should have the option of just using a hand signal, just 'speaking', or doing both... Maybe thats something to add in: Attitudes. I'll explain in a new thread to avoid taking this one off topic.

If you are going for realism, then having to look at the person giving the handsignal would make it more realistic...as you probably know, you must look at someone in "Real life" if they are giving you a hand signal...

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Do these hand actions include "The Finger" cause i'd like that one

anyway, in all seriousness, Hand gestures are great for close range tactics, but as has already been mentioned, you need LOS on the player. I suggested in another thread that maybe we should be able to make it possible for an enemy to 'tap' into communications from the other team, if this was included, hand signals would become a vital part of the game. VoIP would be a nice option as well, i find it easier to press a button and talk that stand around and find buttons (maybe even an 'automatic mic activation' would be nice. It transmits when the volume gets to a certain height)

Just a few things to concider i suppose