Hi, this is gabe newell, welcome to half life three
Joint Flash Test
Joint Flash Test, is just a pure visual code test, the idea was to figure out means of making it easier to design bosses with joints without code.
I experimented with this idea using Macromedia Flash (which become Adobe Flash and then became Adobe Animate).
The concept was, instead of brute force coding a bunch of annoying scripts and math functions and timings, why not just create the animation ahead of time in flash then export it somehow.
So the idea was I animated some dummy characters above, and then I exported a low quality png sequence for the sausage thing and the stick dude.
The result was that indeed you could have motion tween animations, and you could then theoretically break it apart so that if you fought a boss and could destroy it’s arm, you’d have to export a separate png sequence for that arm. The challenge then becomes if you’re going to do different animations then it can be a bit tedious to handle the exporting and importing which from my experience is really tiring.
I’m not sure what I think of that approach now, but it certainly can work (even if it’s a bit jank because you would have to figure out collisions since the origin point of each joint doesn’t change). And the issue of wanting to work with delta time smoothness or even intentional game slomo sequences would make the result choppy instead of smooth.
So yeah, that was a test, this was a post, that was a gaben.
-Brandon