News - Tuesday 30th August 2005 - 10:42pm
Blazing Fists first title to demonstrate 'Bodybag.'
London, UK.
BAFTA winner and Develop Awards nominee, Morpheme
Wireless announces it's unique 'Bodybag' skeleton engine. The studio is at
the forefront of pushing the boundaries of mobile gaming development and is well
recognised for its creative and technical achievements in this field. The 'Bodybag'
engine can be seen in action in the stunning new beat-em-up Blazing Fists.
Matt Spall, Managing Director and co-founder of Morpheme Wireless commented, "Morpheme
has been planning to add a fighting game engine to its roster for a long time
now, but we found the limitation imposed on graphic size a real inhibitor to gameplay
- the Bodybag engine has now not only given us a very viable platform for fun
fighting games, it's opened up a whole range of opportunities for games with
skeletal based characters - human or otherwise"
Not only has the team developed an animation engine that requires minimal space
in the code, Morpheme has also been able to make the Bodybag visually impressive.
Blazing Fists includes fighters, which are two-thirds the height of the screen,
irrespective of the device, all with their own very distinct appearance (e.g.
a robot, a gorilla, a praying mantis).
Most commonly used methods revolve around the use of animated sprites, but the
more detailed and complex the requirement, the more frames of animation and space
in the code is required.
To tackle this problem, Morpheme Wireless developed an engine that made use of
characters composed of separate body parts - head, torso and limbs; each frame
of animation drawn at particular coordinates - with the advantage of being able
to fit an enormous number of different frames of animation into memory - far more
than if each frame was represented as a sprite.
Morpheme's 'BodyBag' Engine offers greater flexibility. Its most useful feature
is the ability to procedurally interpolate between animation frames. The nature
of the engine allows the team to animate large amounts of movement using very
limited memory and simple scripting.
At the heart of the engine is a 'skeleton' built out of 2-dimensional vectors.
Key frames, where the skeleton is in a particular position are stored, and the
nodes (at the ends of the vectors) are able to move from position to position
over a number of frames. As only key frames need to be defined, and interpolate
the intermediate ones, much smoother animation is obtained for (almost) free.
The scripting of moves is very simple, each move is comprised of a small set of
adjustable values which dictate the destination and length of the animation as
well as setting which body part will make the move. By having such a simple script
structure, not only can moves be generated and adjusted quickly, but anyone in
the development team can create the animations - in the case of Blazing Fists,
all the
animations were created by the artist and designer.
Catch up with Morpheme's new lineup at Games Market Europe, Business Design Centre,
London, 31st Aug - 1st Sept 2005 & TIGA Content Market at GDCE, Café
Royal, Piccadilly, London 31st Aug & 1st Sept.
About Morpheme Wireless Ltd.
Formed in 1999 and based in London, England, Morpheme Wireless (www.morphemewireless.com)
is one of the worlds leading developers of cell-phone based entertainment products.
Recent releases include the BAFTA winning Bluetooth BiPlanes, Phantom Mansion
Origins and Balloon Headed Boy with his 32 levels of rubberised madness, and in
its guise as developer, Morpheme has developed The Fast and The Furious for I-Play,
Poker Million: Texas Hold'em for Player One and The London Tube map for Transport
for London. In addition to its current portfolio of games Morpheme developed and
maintains MorphMark, a revolutionary benchmarking application that in 2005 will
see a substantially improved public release making it the definitive system for
testing application performance of Java handsets.