Animation trouble

[Ernesto]

Hi,

I'm the new one. And I'm from Germany, so my English may sound strange at times.

For years now I'm wondering: Why would X want to pack his/her weapon neatly back in his/her backpack and slowly pull out a new gun before returning fire (Replace X with any shooter hero.)? In a 'panic' situation, say, close combat with a really inappropriate heavy sniper rifle instead of the trusty smg, I don't care about that rifle. I want to dump it asap and get on with the shooting.

I mean, how hard can it be to allow the player to interrupt this animation at time t0 and play it backwards a little faster from then on? This is something that annoyed me in every shooter. Granted that I didn't play any recent shooters, but it seems like the animations themselves have gotten extremely good, only the playback system is still from 1996...

Another example:
It popped into my mind only recently while watching the Dishonored trailer. I'd hate to try peeking through a keyhole while realizing that someone is about to spot me, but NOT being able to hide because of a wonderful but extremely inconvenient animation.

So, What...sorry...Wot do you think?

Best regards,
Ernesto

[SirKicksalot]

Procedural animation is the solution.

[Memph]

Often it can be simply be deemed as a game mechanic. ME3 for example. It takes forever to swap weapons and you can't run when reloading. This keeps the player under pressure and encourages (or should at least) using cover and receiving support from team-mates. Without the fixed pause, you'd very rarely be in a tense position with enemies incoming and no immediate way to retaliate - this is where the skill of managing your attacks, be they bullets or power cooldowns come in - furthermore your spec/build and which cooldowns you've chosen to optimise. Animations can be cancelled immediately and are, but again it's to the benefit of play mechanics that when you use a power or fire your gun it will cancel your reload, meaning the player has to do what they mean to do and mistakes can be made. Without this management element, you're just endlessly spamming attacks willy-nilly with little care for what to use when. It's often what a game is built around, thus in a way, asking why a character cannot reload faster is kinda the same as asking why Mario can't jump higher.

[Ernesto]

Maybe I should clarify this. I'm not asking for faster animations. I'm asking for interruptable animations, maybe more like adaptive animations.

To stay with your ME3 example: Even Shepard wouldn't stoically keep on reloading or switching weapons while he/she is getting hit. He/she would try to get the hell out of there and behind some cover. At least that's what I, as the player, want. Dying because an animation has to play until the end, not matter what, is very annoying.

It doesn't look that easy now... Because when I'm strolling around without any immediate danger the animation should finish normally. So it has to be case sensitive somehow...

Any sources for procedural animation? Did anyone implement that yet?

[soldant]

Any sources for procedural animation? Did anyone implement that yet?

Spore did, as did Trespasser to an extent. Spore does a reasonable job but still manages to look fairly ridiculous (which is fine for the game but wouldn't be for many others).

I can see what you're saying but at the same time you're asking for a fairly robust and reactive animation system, something I don't think is worth spending as much time on as other elements. As Memph said, animations can tie in to gameplay decisions (or they can be entirely divorced from them, like in WoW for the most part). I know at least in ME2 that Shepard could be interrupted by particular attacks (heavy attacks or having shields/barrier broken) and caused a stagger animation to play, which is a gameplay mechanic.

It's frustrating when you die because an animation has to play, but I agree with Memph that it's ultimately done for gameplay reasons. Ideally you just don't want to be in that position period. Also I think the other danger here is that everything will turn into a cover shooter, which is bad because apparently nobody really uses cover and we all stand around shooting each other while standing up. At least that's what I'm told when people complain about cover systems.

[Mistabashi]

Any sources for procedural animation? Did anyone implement that yet?

Overgrowth is probably the most accomplished use of procedural/physics based animation in a game. There's probably some dev diary posts/videos out there that demonstrate it.

[thegooseking]

Also I think the other danger here is that everything will turn into a cover shooter, which is bad because apparently nobody really uses cover and we all stand around shooting each other while standing up. At least that's what I'm told when people complain about cover systems.

I thought we all circle-strafed, bunny-hopped and ran backwards.

[Ernesto]

Often it can be simply be deemed as a game mechanic

Ok, then I add the restriction that certain gameplay mechanics should be allowed to override animation interruptions.

I can see what you're saying but at the same time you're asking for a fairly robust and reactive animation system, something I don't think is worth spending as much time on as other elements

I'd rather see some resources used in that area than 16x AA,AF,tesselation-whatever graphics improvements. Intelligent animation sure would catch my eye easier (to see that, I wouldn't need a loupe or screenshots for comparison).

Also: Imho long uninteruptable animations feel like unskippable cutscenes...which is almost as bad ;)