I hope FDev's takeaway from that video is not that that they should add more !@£$€#!!! input smoothing and other keypress-to-action lag. One need to be careful with what one wish for -- them genies can have a cruel sense of humour (I'm sure I'm not the only one who read the title of this very thread as: "Please take away the virtual screen too, and leave us with nothing").
(At the same time, I too tend to find myself apalled by animation that snaps between states, and can not deny having already whinged about it myself, with regards to Odyssey alpha -- it's hard, if not impossible, to make animation look natural,
and eminently responsive to player input. -Not having to see people turn like weathervanes, and halting mid-stride, and bunnyhopping everywhere, etc, etc, is one major perk to not having any interest what so ever in multiplayer gaming. :7)
I do wonder if the reason the avatar has that... "dainty" jogging animation, is for the purpose om making the hands dip into the frame in 2D mode, were one to make the thought experiment that maybe the game could be using a lot of the same animation set and model, for first and third person views. :7
I did notice that the avatar's feet actually
do swivel, to align with the normal of the ground beneath them (..or at least nearby them, often enough), sometimes into quite painful-looking angles. Unfortunately that alone does not help with dispelling how obvious it is that the legs are more suspended under the skeleton root (at the hip, which is usually the translation reference point), than actually looking like they bear the weight of the avatar. That decimetre or two that one
glide forwards, when starting to move, before any locomoting animations starts, kind of makes me groan every time - so rather a few times per hour . :/
(Man, how I'd love to see what the game would looks like with raytracing, by the way -- even though I guess we'd be talking a frame an hour.
Proper, accurate shading, shadows, reflections, and refractions, and none of it chunky and aliased - mmmmm.
On a nearlying by-the-by, the alpha is obviously not
entirely without optimisation; Shadows are rather aggressively distance-culled in interiors, for example, and pop in some ten paces away, by my idle estimation - sometimes jarringly making it look like somebody switched a lamp on or off; And whilst we heard that interiors and their residents are still drawn even when you are far above a settlement in a ship; Man, how close one need to fly to the windows of the concourse building, before they fade from solid black, to showing what's behind them... ('Wonder what's going on with small glass objects, by the third; Maybe the centre for their environment mapping lies outside the meshes or something... or does not everybody get glasses and vials and stuff, that are just a solid tone of darkening what's behind them, with some specular highlighting at the edges, instead of looking like... you know: glass..? )
It might, however, be enough to use the explorer scanner thing when we get access to it.
