If playing pool with someone special by a roaring fireplace while it snows outside sounds like a dream, then NWN sponsoring partner Dutchie has a holiday surprise for you: A restored antique billiard table with a full set of playing animations (both PG and Adult), including balls that roll and bump across the table when hit. (As ably demonstrated above by Freyja Nemeth of the SL blog Otherworldly.)
The six player animations cycle through an entire match, with the ball movement enabled not via physics, but as Dutchie tells me, through some clever scripting:
"Not physics, good old mathematics. I thought up the six playing scenes, what positions the players and the balls should have, where the balls should end up, and which ones had to disappear off the table. Spanish scripter Auryn Beorn of Black Tulip, whom I have been working with since 2014, did all the math. She did the trajectories, different ball speeds, made them disappear right when they were above the holes, etc. I then adjusted the custom animations and different cues to make it look like they actually hit the white balls. It's only six dynamic playing scenes, that make one game, but they took weeks for us to think and set up.
"The rest of the engine is made with the open-source AVsitter scripts and several other Black Tulips scripts, like one that adds Bento facial expressions, Bento hand movements to older pre-Bento animations, and such."
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