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G0RF posted:The sad thing is that the motion capture didn't look much different than what they had at CitizenCon 2013. Save for the ladder climbing animations. Those look better now. I forgot how much good ladder climbing animations meant to good gameplay, just look at what a failure Donkey Kong was.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:13
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I have the horrible thought just now from what Loiosh posted that the game will crash and burn but they'll have an engine to license and the nightmare will continue.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:19
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Is it common for video games to use mocap for everything these days even as mundane as climbing up ladders and walking? I thought most of the time it was just used for cut scenes to capture an actor's performance because it has to be cleaned up so much anyway I would think it would be easier just to have an animator do a walk / run cycle or climb up a ladder.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:21
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Or they have some really spiffy gear but Crobber fired everyone who knew how to use it.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:24
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Vire posted:Cool thanks that is actually interesting to know. So they have actually implemented the zone nesting in their frankenstein engine already? Is this why everything that should be simple is now broken because it's so ridiculous to do something like that having every ship having its own gravity while dudes outside of it float freely? Well, there's a couple of parts to that depending on what broken you're talking about. The zoning is relatively nice in the slices we've seen. It works well and is multiplayer. One of the funny notes about that is they just got player counts back up (it was down to 2 players stable for awhile as they fixed some major desync bugs). The biggest jank is something that has always plagued CryEngine, and that's movement. Movement refinement is hard, the reason Destiny, CoD/Half-life/Quake-engine games, and Unreal feel good to move in is because they were designed from the ground-up to be great shooter games. Everything followed from a core engine designed to make movement and shooting feel excellent. Bethesda games feel like poopoo when you are moving because their engine was designed with a different goal (wide expanses and heavy scripting). CryTek came from the FarCry engine, and was primarily designed as a demonstration of streamed asset loading (to make the world feel seemless, without loading). The movement has never felt fluid (Ubisoft would eventually rewrite /all/ of the movement code after they got FarCry 2 for their Dunia engine). Flying vehicles and zero-g were bolted in with Crysis and never well optimized. If you remember Crysis 1 MP the vehicles were always jerky and weird because of the lack of effort to clean things up. For Star Citizen, Croberts knew they needed to fix this, so they brought on a dev who they thought could do something similar to the Dunia engine for them, basically do a rewrite of the animation, IK and pre-IK engine, and movement code. Unfortunately that team (IllFonic) was entirely not up to the task (I'm guessing something like Batman: Arkham Knight by Iron Galaxy bad). If you saw those early presentations when they were first showing off the FPS stuff it was really jittery, lots of horrible animation interruptions and stuttering. It kinda looked like... well let's not go there. IT was bad. Bad enough that Chris, who is a huge fan of FPS games, pulled it away from them and scrapped their work to redo it in house. That's kinda when I took a step back and got concerned about the direction of the game. At the time I did not realize how bad the work coming from IllFonic was. I've seen a number of early releases (you should see what Frostbite looked like during its first two years), and recognize jank being part of it, but SC's combat was -bad-. The other part of broken is the animation transitions. Normally in game engines the animation clean-up side of things tends to come in later, after the engine is alpha'd so that the animation team can have a good idea of what their target is (Will we have IK? Will we need pre-IK? Blending? Tagging?). They'll have a target height and a nailed-down collision system to work with. Previous to that, they use bare animations and work on things like walk/run cycles and incidentals (death animations, opening doors, picking up items, etc). The polish comes in supporting clean transitions, where you add in the code and animations that link between various stands (walking -> stand. Running -> stand. Running -> against a wall. Reversing direction in run, etc). SC recently went through a rebase on their core skeleton, that is, they changed some of the properties of the essential base for all of their animation rigs (I recall this is to support a more robust item system), and when you do that, you have to redo all the rigs and then either recapture or tweak every single animation to fix where they break. This, combined with tossing IllFonic out, is why the FPS combat stuff is -so- delayed, even beyond AC 2.0, and why the presentations look so janky in the animation department. When it's fixed, the devs will be able to 'tag' entry and exit points (in fact, this is going on right now), so that the animations will correctly trigger when the player, for example, approaches a doorway during an EVA. If you watch the first Multicrew reveal vs the Citizon Con AC 2.0 reveal, you can actually see a few of these tagged animations get added into the engine. Generally this is the stuff that is added later, but because of how SC is being designed, you actually got to see what happens when an animation system is scrapped and a new one added in.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:25
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Sarsapariller posted:TLDR: CIG is much closer to Cutco than they are to Bernie Madoff. It's both actually. consider jpegs as bad stocks. people are buying them in the hope that one day they will be worth much more than they paid for (see limited edition jpegs). there are people who genuinely think they will make a profit when the game comes out and selling their ships ala Eve.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:30
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Vire posted:Is it common for video games to use mocap for everything these days even as mundane as climbing up ladders and walking? I thought most of the time it was just used for cut scenes to capture an actor's performance because it has to be cleaned up so much anyway I would think it would be easier just to have an animator do a walk / run cycle or climb up a ladder. Yes, it is very common because it is generally quicker (to get nicer results) than traditional key animation. For those who wonder, generally you want to do incidental animations via mocap (things that are unique and quick) and cinematics (Last of Us is a great example of this). You want to save things that are repetitive and players will see a lot for your best Key Frame animators. So things like run and walk cycles. What happens now days is a studio will spend a day or more doing walk/run, climb, and jump up/down, ladder, mantle, etc animations with each main character actor. Then this is handed over to mocap cleanup where they fix issues with the animation curves and missing data. Once the basic cleanup is done, for those critical motions that will have a lot of use (walking, running, going into cover, standing in cover, crawling in cover, etc) you hand those to your key animators and let them refine them so they fit in your animation system and make them look alive. Meanwhile, on the mocap stage you do cinematic work. And then later do pick ups for incidentals (picking up a glass, picking up an item at rest, leaning, that kind of stuff) when you figure out things you can add into the engine without a big impact. Usually this is done well after you have a skeleton and have rigged it for mocap. In the case of SC, they had to redo this a few months ago, which is why things looked so bad at Gamescom, but looked (only barely) better at Citizencon. Between those times they did a redesign on the player skeleton to support a better attachment system and then had to rerig the skeleton and -then- do mocap capture for the new rig and retarget whatever animations could be scrapped. It's one of those things like 64-bit level space, that flies under the radar of casual observers, but is a big tell that there are fixes going on under the hood. You generally never see this kind of information come out in the public. Most people don't even know that for Far Cry 2 (and 3!) the entire animation system was tossed out in the middle of development to fix it because Ubisoft didn't like the feel.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:34
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peter gabriel posted:I don't like people who tell me how to have my steak cooked, just lay off my meat preferences dude like seriously gently caress off I'm guilty of this in the past, but now I'm trying to not be.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:35
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pgabs the way you cook hot dogs is wrong 
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Nov 9, 2015 19:46
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Wafflz posted:pgabs the way you cook hot dogs is wrong Does he put ketchup on them too? Totes wrong.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:48
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Romes128 posted:I'm ok with pc gaming dying. If by dying you mean we get cool games but miss out on "AAA" poo poo i'm also ok with this. Darksouls 3 on the ps4, Elite: Dangerous on the PC. Everything as it should be.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:49
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Regarde Aduck posted:If by dying you mean we get cool games but miss out on "AAA" poo poo i'm also ok with this. Darksouls 3 on the ps4, Elite: Dangerous on the PC. Everything as it should be. Rebel Galaxy, Else Heart.Break(), SOMA I wish more people would play Else. It's a weird little gem.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:50
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peter gabriel posted:I don't like people who tell me how to have my steak cooked, just lay off my meat preferences dude like seriously gently caress off I would say that I hate people who have strong preferences on things but then that would mean that I have a strong preference on peoples preferences so I guess I am part of the problem. sadpaarp
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Nov 9, 2015 19:52
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Rebel is so much fun. When I get frustrated with elite I usually switch to rebel for a 30 minute game.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:52
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Are goons playing Pulsar? Is that any good?
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Nov 9, 2015 19:53
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Regarde Aduck posted:If by dying you mean we get cool games but miss out on "AAA" poo poo i'm also ok with this. Darksouls 3 on the ps4, Elite: Dangerous on the PC. Everything as it should be. DS3 needs to be played on PC
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Nov 9, 2015 19:55
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Loiosh posted:For Star Citizen, Croberts knew they needed to fix this, so they brought on a dev who they thought could do something similar to the Dunia engine for them, basically do a rewrite of the animation, IK and pre-IK engine, and movement code. Unfortunately that team (IllFonic) was entirely not up to the task (I'm guessing something like Batman: Arkham Knight by Iron Galaxy bad). If you saw those early presentations when they were first showing off the FPS stuff it was really jittery, lots of horrible animation interruptions and stuttering. It kinda looked like... well let's not go there. IT was bad. Bad enough that Chris, who is a huge fan of FPS games, pulled it away from them and scrapped their work to redo it in house. That's kinda when I took a step back and got concerned about the direction of the game. At the time I did not realize how bad the work coming from IllFonic was. I've seen a number of early releases (you should see what Frostbite looked like during its first two years), and recognize jank being part of it, but SC's combat was -bad-. First of all- thank you for the interesting perspective on all of this. I really do appreciate reading analysis by someone who knows what they're talking about development wise. Some questions/follow-ups: I was under the impression that most of the rework for the skeletal system was being done because of the weird requirement that first and third-person use the same animations, as opposed to interrupts/jitter? And it doesn't seem like they've done a good job of eliminating jitter, by recent videos. If anything they've made it worse, as you can see in the first minute here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccKp1n13jQ Edit: Ignore the second part, you addressed this in a follow-up post. Sarsapariller fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 19:55
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Since we hit ground floor already, might as well post this: http://kotaku.com/could-a-video-game-start-a-religion-1741098885
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Nov 9, 2015 19:57
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G0RF posted:Apropos of nothing, I'd like to nominate AP as the OP of the eventual new thread. Agreed. Plus AP gives that idiot Karl_something an appropriately hard time.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:58
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Loiosh posted:Rebel Galaxy, Else Heart.Break(), SOMA SOMA was creeping me out in a very good way.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:59
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Soma also creeps me out because I associate that word with this horrible anime called Seikon no Qwaser, and the less I think about that poo poo the happier I am.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:01
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Loiosh posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLB28JvEQAg Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Why, yes, I've been monkeying with that for my superhero game.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:02
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D1E posted:Agreed. Plus AP gives that idiot Karl_something an appropriately hard time. He has sadly yet predictably declined, leaving us at the mercy of the mercurial Smart.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:02
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G0RF posted:He has sadly yet predictably declined, leaving us at the mercy of the mercurial Smart. what about pgabz come on man. Be a dancycat dictator
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Nov 9, 2015 20:03
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Onkel Hedwig posted:Since we hit ground floor already, might as well post this: http://kotaku.com/could-a-video-game-start-a-religion-1741098885 Considering that there are actual Jedi (a religion made up by George Lucas for a movie), I'd say it's not completely crazy to think that some people would start a video game religion irl.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:04
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Regarde Aduck posted:If by dying you mean we get cool games but miss out on "AAA" poo poo i'm also ok with this. Darksouls 3 on the ps4, Elite: Dangerous on the PC. Everything as it should be. tbh it seems to make more sense if the next xbox is basically a steambox running some version of windows but who knows, id rather a future with a pc and buy video cards every few years and get ALL the games... as opposed to pick a platform or buy them all for the exclusives (lol)
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Nov 9, 2015 20:04
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Othin posted:Are goons playing Pulsar? Is that any good? My friends and I were considering getting that to replace Artemis for our weekly LAN party. I would also like to hear opinions from people that have played it.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:05
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Soma would make a great book, but its a pretty "meh" game.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:07
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Loiosh posted:For Star Citizen, Croberts knew they needed to fix this, so they brought on a dev who they thought could do something similar to the Dunia engine for them, basically do a rewrite of the animation, IK and pre-IK engine, and movement code. Unfortunately that team (IllFonic) was entirely not up to the task (I'm guessing something like Batman: Arkham Knight by Iron Galaxy bad). If you saw those early presentations when they were first showing off the FPS stuff it was really jittery, lots of horrible animation interruptions and stuttering. It kinda looked like... well let's not go there. IT was bad. Bad enough that Chris, who is a huge fan of FPS games, pulled it away from them and scrapped their work to redo it in house. That's kinda when I took a step back and got concerned about the direction of the game. At the time I did not realize how bad the work coming from IllFonic was. I've seen a number of early releases (you should see what Frostbite looked like during its first two years), and recognize jank being part of it, but SC's combat was -bad-. Have they actually admitted to scrapping Illfonic's work? The quotes I've read have all been "everything is aye-okay/weeks not months" etcetera
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Nov 9, 2015 20:08
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Sarsapariller posted:First of all- thank you for the interesting perspective on all of this. I really do appreciate reading analysis by someone who knows what they're talking about development wise.  - but my knowledge is limited to just playing and reading.quote:Some questions/follow-ups: I was under the impression that most of the rework for the skeletal system was being done because of the weird requirement that first and third-person use the same animations, as opposed to interrupts/jitter? And it doesn't seem like they've done a good job of eliminating jitter, by recent videos. If anything they've made it worse, as you can see in the first minute here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccKp1n13jQ Edit: Ignore the second part, you addressed this in a follow-up post. I believe you are correct on the major reason. Just as an example of why anyone would care: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXmZX8iz2SE Some classic GAME WTF. Another great one is Trespasser, of which the Let's Play is basically why I signed up on SA. CIG is probably a bit away from getting proper fixes in for those animation issues you are seeing. One of the smallest (but most obvious) is animation/movement disagreement. It's why the steps 'feel' wrong in those gameplay segments. In addition to the weird looking animation, the distance traveled (for the animated step) is not in sync with the distance traveled by the character model. The jerkiness I suspect is a mix of both lack of animation transitions -- which they spoke about in their last two monthly updates -- and the network code for player movement state/animation state being in an early phase. Most game engines handle this by letting the client do the animation state calculations, IE: the network code hands a vector with velocity and the game engine calculates the correct animation, with some tagging to identify when to trigger a transition (from running to stop or running to reverse). This is the kind of thing that gets polished later as MP testing is going on. Because of SC being forward with the progress of the updates, you get to see what this looks like when it is unfinished. Compare that to the Gamecon footage of a similar scene and you can observe some improvements, but at the fundamental level there's still a great deal of work to do.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:12
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Loiosh posted:Sorry for the long poo. That's fine, but; Loiosh posted:Since that point, I've seen a steady release cycle. I'm interested in why you believe that the release cycles have been steady considering that various milestones have changed, prioritized and de-prioritized. I'll also point out that I'm 43, so the old 'everyone forgets how games are developed' doesn't really strike true, considering that I also have kickstarted a few campaigns. Certainly coming out after a couple of years and telling people that 32-bit math isn't going to cut it seems really bizarre, although there was no sense of scaling indicated from the start. This one I threw into before it actually hit kickstarter, based on the idea of producing a new 'wing commander'. It was with some amusement that I started watching the scope creep. Perhaps you'd like to express your feelings on scope creep, or the overall plan/road map? Loiosh posted:Multiplayer Large is released (player counts over 15). What number are they aiming for? Bearing in mind that we already have models for this kind of thing. You've described normal game development, but under a climate of shifting sands. Why do they have shifting sands?
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Nov 9, 2015 20:15
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spacetoaster posted:Considering that there are actual Jedi (a religion made up by George Lucas for a movie), I'd say it's not completely crazy to think that some people would start a video game religion irl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon Although it was a nascent protest over a religious question in the census.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:17
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But Not Tonight posted:Same, I e-mailed them saying that if they didn't get their poo poo together within 48 hours I'd be filing a chargeback so let's see if that's lights a fire under their rear end. A full month after the "Refund granted!" email has ended with my CIG account closed and no refund issued, so I'm trying the Paypay chargeback route now. Unfortunately the charges were from mid-2013, so I have a feeling time is going to work against me here. 
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Nov 9, 2015 20:22
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Warcabbit posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLB28JvEQAg Heh, exactly. If you'd like a little trick, when your player is 'in air' (state jump) to fix the weirdness jumping from one gravity to another, cast a ray each tic that follows the local gravity and a second that follows the global gravity vector (hopefully that makes sense). You can use angle between them to blend the character's 'down' vector and fake gravity changes. Based on the character distance from the local ray, you can blend gravity from local to global to look like the player is jumping from one surface gravity to 'ground'. It'll take a bit of work, but it's a fun trick to try out. Also, make a mobius strip!
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Nov 9, 2015 20:22
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MrDorf posted:A full month after the "Refund granted!" email has ended with my CIG account closed and no refund issued, so I'm trying the Paypay chargeback route now. Unfortunately the charges were from mid-2013, so I have a feeling time is going to work against me here. The good news is that the more people do chargebacks, the easier it gets to do a chargeback. Eventually CIG gets put on the 'these guys suck' list, and chargebacks are granted almost automatically.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:25
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Hav posted:You've described normal game development, but under a climate of shifting sands. Why do they have shifting sands? Incompetent management. Barring outside disaster like "oh gently caress, the developer of the engine we're using just went out of business" or "the building is on fire", the only reason for development to slide around like it has for SC is incompetence. In the case of most games, an incompetent publisher can also cause that sort of effect by forcing the developers to follow some insane decrees, but SC has no publishing company to be doing such. The mark of competent developers is realistic and consistent goalposts for design.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:26
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Tijuana Bibliophile posted:Have they actually admitted to scrapping Illfonic's work? The quotes I've read have all been "everything is aye-okay/weeks not months" etcetera In the way game companies do: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-08-17-illfonic-sees-layoffs 'Cloud Imperium Games has provided GI.biz with a comment on its plans for Star Citizen going forward, explaining the move away from IllFonic as a way to consolidate more development internally.' Aka, we scrapped their work, which is why they did not pick up most of the team and bring them in-house. Bungie did something similar with Destiny, though internally. They never said why the story changed or why Marty O'Donnel was out. Kotaku broke that they completely scrapped their story 6 months before their original launch (and pushed the game back a year), and that Marty was fired because he refused to play ball with Activision's music changes and decided to pout at work about it. Generally the game industry doesn't air their dirty laundry publicly. 
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Nov 9, 2015 20:28
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MrDorf posted:A full month after the "Refund granted!" email has ended with my CIG account closed and no refund issued, so I'm trying the Paypay chargeback route now. Unfortunately the charges were from mid-2013, so I have a feeling time is going to work against me here. Check your credit cards. They did a 'Well golly, we can only give back about half of the amount because we see you've already had a partial refund' thing to me, at which point I (politely) wrote back to correct them and list the exact pledge I'd made. They then paypalled the remainder. Which left me sitting there for a bit wondering where the gently caress the first part of my money was. Then I reread the initial refund mail and saw that they were doing a chargeback instead of a paypal, logged into my credit card site, and found the first part of the refund sitting in there.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:30
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Sarsapariller posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccKp1n13jQ Edit: Ignore the second part, you addressed this in a follow-up post. Um, I just watched this for the first time and...it sort of looked cool 
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Nov 9, 2015 20:32
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Tijuana Bibliophile posted:Have they actually admitted to scrapping Illfonic's work? The quotes I've read have all been "everything is aye-okay/weeks not months" etcetera 
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Nov 9, 2015 20:32
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