Massively^™

The Mini-Show of Krys is an animated Flash series based on gaming humor. It sports an engaging aesthetic and players will recognize their own experiences mirrored in the antics of the protagonists.

Currently, there are six episodes translated into English from the original French, with eight more awaiting the same treatment. Episodes 4, 5, and 6 are connected, and concern themselves with World of Warcraft. If you find that you're bothered by having to read subtitled English, you can watch the original episodes instead.

[Thanks, Krys!]

Danny Southard is an animator for Champions Online who gets to help make all the cool superpower animations players are expecting to see -- when they eventually get their hands on the game. He works on both player powers and specifically NPC powers for characters with all types of limb combinations. From the sounds of it Danny just recently wrapped up some work on super strength and is now working on some martial arts powers. You gotta have the basics covered, y'know.

As far as new Champions Online information goes, Danny does give us a nice hint when asked about his favorite character from the game world. He says, "I can't reveal his name, but he's the biggest flaming gorilla in the history of videogames." Images of the Human Torch combined with Gorrila Grod burst into our minds when thinking about this mystery character. You can never go wrong with pyrokinetic primates.

City of Heroes Dev Back Alley Brawler has been a very busy guy of late. When he's not fending off incoming questions like a tank herding Rikti monkeys, he's working on animations and visual effects. Recently, several powers have seen improvements to their animation speed, allowing players to beat the tar out of stuff much faster than they used to.

Katana was recently improved in this way, and now the set in the spotlight is Martial Arts, which hasn't seen any love for a long, long time. The little pauses have been shaved off, meaning that the kicks and punches now flow beautifully. Forum poster Tormentoso has put together a little demonstration.

Jacek Antonelli, whom you already likely know as the creator of the Blender BVH animation exporter for Second Life, has released an excellent tutorial on getting to grips with Blender and the exporter, so that you can get into this excellent free tool for creating animations.

Her tutorial is simple, straightforward, witty and well-illustrated. If you create Second Life animations, but don't use Blender -- or you want to get into creating animations for Linden Lab's virtual world, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this.

Jacek Antonelli has released a new version of her Blender animation exporter that allows use of Blender's sophisticated (and free) animation suite to create animations for Second Life.

This release focuses primarily on the user-interface, improving the layout to make things a whole lot easier for those who are not already Jedi-masters of the Blender package; and a mighty good change it is, too, as you can see above.

One of the more sophisticated animation tools out there is Blender, a cross-platform, free suite of 3D creation tools. Blender allows a lot of animation tricks that are normally only found in packages costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The eclectic, artistic, and highly-animated Jacek Antonelli has released a script, scene and animation skeleton that allows users to create and export high-quality animations from Blender into the BVH format used by Second Life.

CCP character artist Ben Mathis gave a 30 minute presentation at the New York Comic Con last month. He talked mostly about the forthcoming Ambulation expansion, which will allow EVE Online players to leave their cockpits and walk around the interiors of space stations with customizable, 3D avatars. Ten Ton Hammer has a Flash video of the entire session.

We saw some of the presented content at GDC earlier this year, but there's some new stuff in this video, too. As we've noted before, CCP isn't holding back; Ambulation is very technically impressive. It's ironic that EVE -- a game focused almost entirely on spaceships instead of face-to-face interactions -- might soon carry the most advanced avatar creation tools on the market.

Players will be able to customize every thing from body fat to the materials from which their clothes are made. Female avatars will have makeup customization options so powerful that the differentiation between lip gloss and lip stick will be noticeable. New animation blending technology will enable realistic transitions between disparate facial expressions. Infinite morph points will be available when faces are molded, thanks to creative use of shaders. CCP's ambition is astonishing -- let's hope the reality lives up to the promise in the end.

Ten Ton Hammer has done it once again, providing us with one of the most entertaining guides we've seen yet on Age of Conan: a video guide to /emotes! If you're still apprehensive (which has its own /emote) about getting that pre-order for AoC, this might just do it for you.

Seriously though, these emotes are not only entertaining, they're a testament to the amount of detail that has gone into this game. Mostly, emotes are useful in social roleplaying situations, but to find a game that has this many otherwise seemingly-mundane character animations this early before launch shows that either they got the important stuff out of the way first, or they decided emotes are more important than anything else. Um, we're pretty sure it's the latter. May we suggest the /chicken?

As stated, Dofus is an MMO with an outstanding and appealing aesthetic; one that I've often wished were available to just watch, like a cartoon. Well, apparently Ankama Games and I were on the same wavelength, because sure enough, there's an animated show being produced as we speak!

Wakfu - the TV series follows the adventures of Yugo, a young boy with a strong sense of justice, and his four adventurous friends, each one of them a different warrior type from the world of Dofus. Take a gander at the trailer -- it's a fantastic mix of European and Asian animation styles and perfectly captures the sometimes alien, sometimes whimsical World of Twelve. No release date has been offered, but I'm keeping all channels open for the announcement!

Over the years, most of us have grown accustomed to the typical avatar gestures... /wave, /kiss, /kneel, and the like. Even some of the more outlandish emotes have their place, like /robot or /rude. Of course, this kind of thinking is not out of the box! Since most people labor under the assumption that the money is to be found out of the box, you can pretty well kiss the box goodbye! For Bob Moore of Terra Nova, the most unbox-like development in the MMO sphere is in what he calls "free gesticulation," a technology capable of reading the physical movements of a player and translating them on-screen to their avatar of choice.

The gesture system that exists in games today, coupled with a competent VOIP solution, is adequate for most of your basic communication needs. Standalone gestures like waves, nods, and bows do just fine by their lonesome, and informative pointing gestures work particularly well with VOIP software. But what of expressive or descriptive gestures? Moore suggests that these previously untapped lines of communication could open up whole new avenues of gameplay possibilities, particularly for role players. And best of all, the technology is extremely close to mainstream. All we need is for somebody to implement it. You can practically /kiss the uncanny valley goodbye!

Making a Massive game is mighty complicated. According to programmer Matt Boudreaux at SOE-Austin, no part of the development process is more interconnected than making the pretty avatars move correctly on the screen. The animation process is the subject of a developer diary at the official Star Wars Galaxies site. Matt explains some of the steps required to get an SWG character looking just right.

The basics of animation start with the artists, he details. They create the 'skeleton' on which a mob or avatar is built. With the skeleton in place, designers step in to apply specific animations to activities. In SWG, animations tend to be focused around the tool you're using. Two players using the same attack might see completely different animations because they're using different weapons. Plenty more on the process rounds out his description, which is well worth exploring.

Curse has a new write-up about their recent trip to FunCom where they go over some key issues fans of the upcoming Age of Conan might want to know about. One such thing is in regards to the severe lack of a female presence in the world of Hyboria up to this point. We're told that the main reason we haven't seen any female player characters is that FunCom wanted to do it up right. After all, you only get to make first impressions once. Well, apparently now that females are ready for the spotlight, beta testers can expect to see them as soon as the next patch even. This bodes well for the rest of us seeing the lovely ladies of Hyboria sooner rather than later.

If FunCom takes their armor sets as seriously as they take their Hyborian women, then it sounds like we're in for some satisfying sets of equipment. We're told to expect over 500 unique armor pieces, which in terms of sets doesn't tell us too much. Although a very rough guess on our part would be somewhere in the ballpark of 70-90 armor sets, which would span over three races and twelve classes. If they keep their word then hopefully we won't have a bunch of clones running around.

What really interested us the most, however, was that after hearing lots of concerned feedback on the run animations the developers are going back to the motion capture, uh -- board. Sure, you can expect all sorts of custom fatality animations for different classes, but FunCom continues to impress us with their ability to listen to the community. There's nothing worse than an unnatural looking run animation when you have to stare at it constantly for hours on end.

[Via Worlds in Motion]