City of Heroes developers release an open animation kit for amatuer game developers.
Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes) has released its home-brewed animation tools under the free GNU GPL open source license. CrypticAR allows animators to familiarize themselves with professional-level tools used in developing actual Cryptic titles.
At the Online Game Development Conference (OGDC), Cryptic representatives Shayne Herrera and Sean Burgoon will be discussing the new animation tool set. A message from their OGDC statement reads:
“With our new Cryptic Animation Rig or Cryptic AR, we will give back to the community as well as push ahead with our next-gen development.
Shayne Herrera, Art Development Director for Cryptic Studios, commented, “Our goal is to foster a community of animators by providing them the power to generate animations without having to worry about supporting a toolset. Since we were already developing the rig for our core technology team, we decided to release it to the public under the GNU GPL. We feel that the development and gaming communities will benefit greatly from a professional tool like the Cryptic AR.”
Sean Burgoon added, “We decided to add the ability to switch and create character skins called ‘IDs’ (identities). Cryptic AR version 1.0 ships with three IDs and we plan to release more on a regular basis. We are encouraging user-submitted IDs through the animation community we are creating on our web site.”
