Ragdoll Workshop 3.0.0f1

[Developer Support]

Hi everyone and a happy holiday to those of you celebrating in your part of the world!

After a lot of work and a good deal of dogfooding, Ragdoll Workshop 3.0.0f1 is now ready! If you have not received an email from me with the Unity package, and have confirmed it did not go to your spam, please email support@candlelightinteractive.com.

Changes

There are too many changes to talk about in detail here! Please see the full change list in the documentation, and especially make sure you read over the upgrading section. (Note that although the online API reference is up-to-date, I have not added or revised any tutorials yet.) Some of the major new features (many covered in this video) include:

• Significant CPU and inspector performance increases in my test cases.
• Added ability to run Animator in Normal mode, which lets you use Live Link in the controller window.
• Added lightweight ragdoll setup button to RagdollAnimator inspectors. Use this for performance-critical situations where you do not need individual body part collisions or partial strength and only need to smoothly enter and exit full-hierarchy ragdoll from pure animation.
• Added linear pinning force ratio curve to help keep parts upright when they're at higher strength values.
• Added support for automatically suffering from environmental impacts and raycasted impulses. Note that any parts you wish to impact with kinematic or static environmental colliders must have a strength of less than 1 (e.g., 0.9999999). You can do this by either specifying a strength value on a RagdollState (new!) or setting the maximum strength on the individual parts. It is not recommended you do it for the full hierarchy at once, as your character is likely to get stuck on things.
• Added ability to specify strength thresholds for grounded bodies. If a character's feet are too weak and they contact the floor, it will automatically lose balance and become a ragdoll.
• Overhauled animator orientation parameters to get far more fidelity than a simple supine or prone state. You can now select exactly the best get up animations based on your current pose. This also gives you much better options for e.g., quadrupeds.
• Added full support for breakable joints (no longer require specification of backup joints). You can also make some parts and their children continue to try to animate after they have broken off.
• Improved automatic collision ignoring between ragdoll and animated hierarchies. There are fewer situations that will require layer jockeying on your part. Just check the inspector warning messages if the appear.

As always, please consult the documentation before updating and when/if you encounter bugs! Note that a few properties will be upgraded with this update—make sure you save changes to your prefabs.

Unity Versions

Although it is mentioned in the change list, please note that the new minimum version is Unity 5.2.2. Unity 5.3.0 is recommended, as I may ultimately publish to the Asset Store with it as the minimum version. If you have a chance to test it out, let me know how it works for you!

Roadmap

At this point (apart from a couple of minor features, assorted bug fixes, and further performance improvements), I plan to finally publish the package to the store and handle distribution and updates there again within a couple of weeks. My main task before then is just to do up some more tutorials and polished videos. After that point the product will be on my regular maintenance schedule, so you should expect a couple of regular updates each month.

Thanks again!

[hippo...@hotmail.com]

For goodness sakes Adam.
Only just bought a rival product, then you update to create this magnificent beast! Thank you for the hard work, probably going to have to change a bunch of code back now ;)

[Developer Support]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Rob—I hope you ultimately feel the final product is competitive! Although illness has only just made its way out of our household, I've managed to find and fix a few bugs over the last week, so definitely keep me abreast of your experience with the new features.