Joe Shoopack has done motion capture (mo cap, for short) for a while, beginning when he worked for Blue Sky Software, through his work at Sony's 989 Studios, and now with Sony Online Entertainment. World Series Baseball, Total Control Football, and Game Day '99 PC are all titles on which he's done mo-cap data work. He's the perfect person from whom to learn how it all works.

It began months ago with that long list of animations, put together initially by Anthony Castoro and his team of designers. Back then it wasn't a list of around 750 animations. That list numbered literally in the thousands.

"We start off with a big list of every conceivable animation we want to do in the game," explains Joe. "It's far more than we could implement. We narrow that list and start removing anything that is lower impact, things that are duplicates of others. For example, lets say we have several different types of laugh, a belly laugh, a pointing laugh, and a cackling laugh. Some of those things are near visual duplicates than can be accomplished through text feedback variation from the user."

Many of the proposed animations are what the team refers to as "ambient" animations. These are all the fidgets, head turns, emotes and simple actions that characters will do when not engaging in more elaborate actions. There are over 200 of these, and though they may sound trivial in importance next to a lightsaber moves, they are the subtle touches that make a character live. This is an essential aspect of the game, says Joe. "A larger chunk is going to be devoted to these than in the past, because the social aspect of the game is really important."

That leaves 550 animations for the "other stuff." One might think, watching the many combat moves, that the other stuff will make the game mostly a fighting game, but Joe corrects that assumption.

"On Star Wars we wanted to capture the fighting, which is one of the cool things about the films. And though we're not making a fighting game-fighting is just one aspect of it-we want it to be cinematic enough that it will still convey Star Wars. So that's one of the reasons to add the flourishy combo moves. But it's definitely not going to be primarily a "twitch" fighting game where it's just punch, hit, kick, punch hit, kick."

Those flourishy combat moves are challenging to create, and require very skilled actors who can perform them with not just the precision necessary to re-create the "look" from the movies, but to perform them in such a way that they are believable. When you plan on creating 5-move combos, you can't afford any less than the best.

That's the next step in the motion capture process, finding and hiring the right talent. By now, the team has whittled the huge list down from several thousand animations to a manageable number. "I contacted several Hollywood and LA stunt associations," says Joe. "We requested tapes from everybody and reviewed them, picking the talent that was appropriate to the type of moves we're shooting. So, for all the combat and martial arts moves we got a stunt and martial arts expert. For the emotes, and some of the other standard game animations, we tried to get someone who has experience with motion capture. That's one reason Cosmo Hom is top of the list."

Cosmo Hom is a motion capture veteran, having done work on over 40 games. He is scheduled to perform the last day of the shoot, working on actions for ranged weapon and dance moves.

Wait, dance moves?

SWG is pulling out all the stops to make sure the game really feels like the movies, all the way down to dancing like Oola in Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi. Sabrina Fox, who also works for Sony Online Entertainment as an artist for EverQuest, will be performing the female dance moves. She and Cosmo have worked together before on Siphon Filter 1 and 2.

Of course, dancing won't be for females alone. Male characters will have their own smooth moves, which Cosmo will perform. But that's later in the week.

Today is all about combat.

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