So I've ended up doing it all in Lua, i.e. these are just plain entities, no physics. not characters, no spine tracking, just plain entities with positioning and animation directly controlled by Lua scripting.

Still not perfect but as close as I can get without a lot more work.

My reasoning for posting the (huge) video is to show that even with Lua doing all the hard work on a high resolution the AI bar hardly even registers.

For those interested this is the Lua script.

-- edited to add the cleaned up version of the script

I am a simple man, I see AmenMoses has posted, I click on the thread But seriously, awesome as ever man

Hahaha, this is the best thing ever!

Excellent job on the animation control by the way!

132 lines, but who's counting?

Wonderfull!

Its oddly intensely satisfying to watch, probably because they're literally synced perfectly, Now all we need is a moonwalk and the anti gravity lean and Michael Jackson would be green with envy

Actually if you look at the script they aren't synced perfectly, if they were it would look odd because humans are never synced perfectly, the art of computer AI is based on randomness, in this case there is a random component in when each dancer becomes active, it is subtle but makes a big difference.

Excellent show of animation control. Great job as always. Thanks for the script.

brilliant what more can you say.
and thanks for the script.

would love to see this on done in gg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_Ce8-fGLo

Awesome AmenMoses , i take my hat off to you.

Cool. lol

Every time I get frustrated with something I'm working on I look at the dancers.makes me smile every time,thank you.

Dave

That is sweet - thanks for sharing

@AmenMoses That is serious attention to detail! Bravo sir

So after a lot of faffing around (had to reduce some of the texture sizes) I managed to get the smallest of the zombie models to an uploadable size, it's the policewoman model (who I called Cagney, if you're too young to get the reference ask your parents - or maybe grandparents).

I've also included the lua script with the music loading bit commented out so it can be used straight away, if you have a suitable music file just edit the script to refer to it and uncomment the two lines.

There is a 20 second delay before she starts dancing, there are two reasons for that, 1) the music has a long lead in, 2) it allows time for GamGuru to settle down, for some reason the g_Time value is very erratic when test level first runs, any scripts that rely on it for fine grained timing should allow a few seconds at least for it to settle down. You can reduce it if you want but don't make it less than about 5 seconds.

Feel free to play around with the script to see how it works.

Oh and you can put as many instances of 'Cagney' in a level as you want but make sure you select 'always active' in the properties.

When I say 'as many as you like' it appears the FPS starts to plummet at around 100.

wow, lol... that's a good start into the weekend
great work!!!!

This is so enjoyable to watch, thanks for sharing.

Around 100 before the FPS drops, that is quite good.

Excellent Work!
I love this!
Thank you!
Cagney would be honored.

You're officially the hero of game-guru now. This made my morning, thanks

Addendum: Wow.. your code style humbles me - like, seriously man. Clean, very efficient and intelligently written.


Side note, did you know you can use --[[ and ]]-- as block commenting so you don't have to use -- in front of each line?

Yep I do, but I am so used to Ada that '--' comes naturally to me, in fact muscle memory means I type it without thinking most of the time.

Now if I could just retrain my muscles to stop typing ':=' all the time I could probably code a lot faster.