We regret to tell you that your paper "Real-time realistic animation in the Crystal Space engine" has not been accepted for the “Design and Engineering of Game-like Virtual and Multimodal Environments ” workshop. Below this mail, you can find the reviews of your paper. 



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Paper: 2
Title: Real-time realistic animation in the Crystal Space engine


---------------------------- REVIEW 1 --------------------------
PAPER: 2
TITLE: Real-time realistic animation in the Crystal Space engine
 
OVERALL RATING: 1 (weak accept)  

This short paper is well written en clearly structured. The authors give a nice
overview of the related work and other similar systems.

However, it is not really a research paper as it does not contain a description as
to how this system, or the extension, is different from the others in the field. A
question which arises is how the authors cope with any problems that others might
have.

A nice extension would be to more clearly highlight the differences with others. 



---------------------------- REVIEW 2 --------------------------
PAPER: 2
TITLE: Real-time realistic animation in the Crystal Space engine
 
OVERALL RATING: -1 (weak reject)  

The paper explains how animation can be provided in a game engine.

Animation is still a difficult aspect on game design, as it requires a high amount
of user input. I therefore find the subject of the paper interesting and relevant,
but the design and engineering aspects of the paper are not always clear. It often
reads as a description of functionalities that is realized by interfacing existing
software libraries.

Should this paper be accepted, I would therefore recommend to shorten the content on
the first two pages and to focus more on the example of human walking. The paper
already gives some hints to the design aspects, but these should be elaborated on in
more detail. 



---------------------------- REVIEW 3 --------------------------
PAPER: 2
TITLE: Real-time realistic animation in the Crystal Space engine
 
OVERALL RATING: 1 (weak accept)  

The paper presents recent results gained by the addition of new components dedicated
to the physical simulation of virtual worlds to the Crystal Space Engine. These are
a skeletal animated mesh, an animation blending tree, and several new animation
nodes.

In the introduction section the authors present several requirements for realizing
realistic motions in virtual scenes and note that even simple actions, such as
walking depend on several parameters, such as the gender, the body size and weight.
Further on, grabbing intelligence, complex movements for collision avoidance, the
consideration of human skin bends as well as the consideration of face muscles is
stated as important.

In the following sections these requirements were not explicitly addressed and thus
it remains unclear how the described plugins as well as the blending trees are
utilized to implement for instance the grabbing intelligence.

The related work section argues mainly by citing web references to software products
but misses a consideration of relevant scientific work in the area of animation in
virtual worlds. When reading the discussion about already existing software it
remains unclear, on which related work the authors work is based on as well as it
misses to state the reasons for the choice. A detailed discussion of related work
based on the initially presented requirements is missing. 

The following sections 'Physical Simulation' as well as 'Skeletal Animation' are
unstructured and miss some kind of a connection to the previous section and it is
hard to differentiate the description of the already existing parts of the Crystal
Space engine and the authors' additions. 

Suggestions:

Characterize the related work based on the requirements, otherwise it remains
unclear which aspects are completely new or if the main outcome is the combination
of all requirements.

To the end of the introduction there should be a paragraph describing the upcoming
structure of the paper. There it should be added as well, which sections describe
basic concepts and existing features of CS (sections: Concepts of physical 'pysical simulation')

For the state of the art section it would be especially interesting to
differentiate: which additions 1) are completely new or implement a more efficient
algorithm, 2) are already existing in commercial products but have not been made
available to the public (e.g. by open source or papers describing the algorithms).
Further on relevant scientific work needs to be identified and discussed. References
need to quote the date they have been accessed the last time.