It’s “silly” and not “insanity” because there’s a code workaround for it, but for an otherwise full-featured and complete toolset authored by an experienced, knowledgeable team, it’s a glaring, almost astounding, omission.

There’s no native support for boned animations in XNA.

XNA’s touted as the Indie developer’s next best friend. Rapid game development, developed and supported by Microsoft, using a free version of their highly productive and accessible development environment, complete with everything you need to make AMAZING GAMES for WINDOWS and XBOX 360.

But there’s no native support for boned animations, something I’ve had since at least 2000 or so in just about every other rapid game development package on the market no matter how amazing or crap it is. This makes so little sense to me that I didn’t even consider it might be a possibility when I was building my 3D entity-level object code.

Now, this isn’t crazy, only silly, because, as I mentioned, code that manages boned animations is available on the XNA Creators’ Club.    It’s not part of the MSDN Help files, since it’s not native, but it’s available… with limitations.  Because I only have access to a default pass of vertex shaders, I have to artificially limit the number of bones per model to 59 (coincidentally, the number of bones the shaders can process per model in one pass).  Generally this isn’t horrible, but it does limit us significantly, and it’s mystifying why this sort of limitation should be present in something that’s otherwise a very well-considered and full-featured development framework.

So yes, that means engine development continues to move forward after a horrifying moment where I thought I was doing all this work for absolutely nothing.  Just wanted to share my amazement.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Engine.