Hi Juggernaut,
There is a difference between limbs and joints, although the difference in DBP isn't always clear. If you have a single mesh, with 100 joints, I believe the entire mesh will be treated as 1 limb and rendered at the same time. DBP will pass all the joint rotation matrices with the mesh vertex data and it'll get rendered at the same time. It'll be slower, because lots of different rotation calculations are happening on different vertices, but it'd be slower in any engine. That's the draw back of skeletal animation.
Any issues with multiple limb rendering slow down will be when you have separate meshes in 1 object. DBP will probably swap textures, render limbs separately and various other things. None of us really know how it works behind the scene, but for your giant creature, if he has 1 mesh with 100 joints, it probably won't cause DBP any slow down that it wouldn't cause another engine. I've never seen a 100 joint model in any professional game though, and there's probably a reason why .... it'd be really slow! You've got to be realistic with your crazy inventions!
In Carnage, the animation is quite ropey. I don't used Enhanced Animations, because that demo was put together very quickly. The animation is one of the weakest points of the demo, so don't use it as an example of what DBP is capable of. With Enhanced Animations, you can do much better, and that's what I'll be using for the full game.
As for the top down camera, that may change in the full version, but as indi game devs, we have to accept the fact we will never compete with the AAA games. We can't possibly produce their quality and quantity of media, and my feeling is that you have to find a niche if you want to stand out. Since there are countless gorgeous looking third person games, it'd be very hard to compete with them. By making Carnage more top down, I add to it's uniqueness and help it to stand out. I would never make an FPS game, for example, because it'll always be compared to AAA FPS titles, and never be successful. By pushing the top down vantage point, among other things, I can at least try and stand out a little more.
With regard to the plug-ins you mentioned, I have used very few of them. My thoughts are plug-ins generally allow you to implement a technical concept very quickly and easily, but ultimately do it more slowly than you could do it yourself, because they have to do it in a generic way that works for every scenario. Either that, or they are limited in functionality and you find yourself having to code additional content anyway to achieve the result you need. I only buy/use plugins that offer me something I can't code myself.
So the plug-ins I've used are:
EZ Rotate (Essential for complex 3D rotation calculations that are beyond my maths ability/patience)
Enhanced Animations (Essential for complex animation scenarios and blending, and I couldn't write this plug-in better myself, so why try?)
Sparky's Collision DLL (This is an old freebie, and still widely used, for simple but fast collision which is way better than the built in DBP collision commands, and another area of maths I'm not great at)
As for Dark Physics, I've used that a few times, but never rigorously. I made some quite cool things with it. I started making a hover racing game years ago when it was release. I remember that being quite easy to make, as I just used a series of rolling cylinders. The cars was more driving than hovering, but it was quite fun to control ...
I also used it in a zombie game I don't have a video of, for hinged doors and general sliding collision and character controllers. It worked well, and the doors could be kicked off their hinges. But I remember I wasn't able to get Rag Dolls to work correctly back then (joint limitations didn't work properly). I personally would require that from any physics engine I used now. I will probably look at other physics engine when I start on the full version of Carnage in DGDK.
Woah ... this is a mammoth reply. But anyway, yes, you could make an FPS game without using any of those plug-ins. It's all down to your own abilities as a coder, and specifically with the complex algorithms and maths involved in things like AI, collision and physics.
Hope my massive rant helps somewhat!
