For my graduate school capstone project I worked on a game called Remote Shepherd, which, more so than many other games, consisted largely of sitting back and watching virtual people. For the development team this meant that the player is spending a lot of time watching and considering our character animations. To try to make this more interesting, and to keep the animation and AI systems from becoming entangled, I developed an animation control system that would allow character animations to be more dynamic, thus more interesting. The system also allowed the use of many different sets of character animations by combining atomic animations, as well as allowed the AI system to control the character animations in as simple a way as possible. I called the system the State-subState-Set Animation Engine [3SAE].
