Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
- Thread starter Yaffle
- Start date
-
- Tags
- star citizen
Today's adventure in the verse...
'Spawned my Valkyrie and it ended up outside the NBIS Hangars, and fell to the ground, landing upside down. After a few minutes and a very jank STV ride later, I managed to recover it. Oooor so I thought.'
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/170cwyb/spawned_my_valkyrie_and_it_ended_up_outside_the/
'Spawned my Valkyrie and it ended up outside the NBIS Hangars, and fell to the ground, landing upside down. After a few minutes and a very jank STV ride later, I managed to recover it. Oooor so I thought.'
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/170cwyb/spawned_my_valkyrie_and_it_ended_up_outside_the/
What do they mean by unified avatar?
I don't understand this at all. They have a mocap studio, they have an animation department with male and female models, why can't they do the logical thing of using female mocap on female bones?
This implies they're still trying to force it to work on either a modified model/bones or modified mocap.
There's no easy way to deal with equipment and clothing except make a female version of everything. Scaling just doesn't work.
I feel like instead of crossing the bridge CIG is climbing the mountain to walk around the source of the river.
OK the second video (from 2 years ago) made it a lot clearer and made me sigh in real life. They have a purpose made female model and if by "retargetting" the September summary meant adjusting male animation, then that's a workload they imposed on themslves and it will never look right.
The video sounds like the guy is complaining about haivng to make a female version of everything though. It's just work they have to do and probably had been easier and faster if they (knew they have to) make male and female version of everything from the beginning.
They use a full body third-person avatar for both third and first person views. For various sketchy reasons...
I know Chris has made claims for slicker animations being a side-effect of the unified body model, but I believe he was talking about that fact that all of the 3rd person animations would be seen from a 1st person perspective, instead of using a more basic rig for first person, IE:
Source: https://twitter.com/ollymoss/status/697926382861492224
Bonus fun one
Bonus fun EDO one
---
Of course we've since seen all the downsides of that approach. The endless wrangling with headbob. The difficulties getting animations to work satisfactorily when grabbing items, seating, displaying cosmetics etc (all revisited at length with the female avatars, because everything designed to date had been for the male version). All because Chris insists they have to physically tally with the surrounding environment as exactingly as possible. (Whereas the standard system could give that impression a lot more easily via fudges.). And yet for all of his insistence that a hand can reach out and grab a T-shirt off the rack seamlessly and accurately from both perspectives, you still end up with stuff like this
Source: https://i.imgur.com/veDVgge.mp4
Because duh, 1:1 physical correlation between mocapped animations and the game world is a daftly exacting objective. It really does feel like Chris has sometimes pursued a 'make it real' agenda which is not hugely practical
And then devs essentially end up faking stuff anyway (like the first person shiver when cold), because of the insane amount of work involved no doubt...
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/g9hjnb/what_about_the_third_person/
Faking first person kinda happens for sensible reasons
A few games / mods have done it (Arma etc), but most just 'fake' the first person view. Because it's the no-brainer solution. (Which leaves you free to get on with making your game fun
).
Unified avatar actually makes a lot of sense to me. What doesn't make sense is how it would create more work for single player gameplay. All they had to do is animate it in 3rd person and since the models are the same it will look right in 1st person. They have to do it anyway for the multi-player Star Citizen gameplay so what are they complainig about? Unless you can't switch between 1st and 3rd person in whatever they're working on, or if the 1st person portion will never make it into Star Citizen.They use a full body third-person avatar for both third and first person views. For various sketchy reasons...
A few games / mods have done it (Arma etc), but most just 'fake' the first person view. Because it's the no-brainer solution. (Which leaves you free to get on with making your game fun
If they braged about that then it must be before that video from 2 years ago, because why would they brag about scaling a model to fit both genders after an emplyee says that doesn't work.
Probably
EDIT: Hah, nice one. (Straight in the Unified Av vid I've got pencilled in
)It sounds like a good plan on the surface, but it's telling that nobody does it.
Think about all CIG's bespoke ship interfaces for example. In the traditional approach you just get a basic arm rig to appear to reach out to the correct place. Job done. In CIG's world they need to mocap bespoke moves and edit them to actually reach out accurately to the location, without clipping, distending in any location etc. (And do even more painful retargeting for the female variant).
For all the various savings unified avatars bring, the additional complexity costs clearly outweigh them. (And CIG have run headfirst into every conceivable complicating factor
).Good old Boredgamer.
Only took them 7 years to realize women move differently from men.
One wonders how the game was close to release in 2014 (according to Chris, Sandi, and Erin). Were they going to release the game without females?
They did, but Sandi insisted on being the model. Then the devs insisted it be a human female.
To be fair, according to the bible even God didn't know he had to make both at the beginning.
Are you implying Chris is less than god?
the way I see it, the animation has to be done anyway for NPC and AI crew the only difference is writing codes to tell the hand what the mouse pointer in interacting with. Even 1st person games has to show AI doing certain animations.It sounds like a good plan on the surface, but it's telling that nobody does it.
Think about all CIG's bespoke ship interfaces for example. In the traditional approach you just get a basic arm rig to appear to reach out to the correct place. Job done. In CIG's world they need to mocap bespoke moves and edit them to actually reach out accurately to the location, without clipping, distending in any location etc. (And do even more painful retargeting for the female variant).
For all the various savings unified avatars bring, the additional complexity costs clearly outweigh them. (And CIG have run headfirst into every conceivable complicating factor
If its an issue of complexity then its more about CIG's ability ceiling. Maybe not with the actual coders but the head of CIG not knowing what the industry had been doing and keep making up new terms for things already industry standard.
I was going to make the joke it looks unnatural because Sandi was a bad actress, and now I did.
Are you saying Chris Roberts is not god? You're going to break so many Citizens heart.
3.21 is general for 3.21.x. I didn't wrote 3.21.0. And I wrote "will" not "is" (I would have used 'is' if I thought it was in the current 3.21.0 atm on the PTU).
Last edited:
Yes on third-person needing to be done anyway. (This is where the idea of presumed efficiency comes from). But they can't just write 'code' per animation though. They're having to rework the mocap data by hand seemingly, on a case by case basis. (Everything has been made more complex by CIG going for a mocap-heavy approach, natch. [And grabbing a ton of it back in the Obama era
. Before they fully knew their own metrics and use cases...])I guess the TLDRs for me are:
- The devs aren't complaining without reason. What they're trying to do is more work intensive than usual. (And sometimes hugely inefficient).
- The output to date in terms of 'hand reaches to item accurately' interaction fidelity isn't much better than the traditional easy approach. (IE it's not great).
- CIG made this rod for their own back.
- The end result could end up being above-par, in terms of slick blended mocapped animations seen from both perspectives. But those potential benefits are currently heavily undercut by desync etc in the PU and have very likely acted as a blocker for SQ42.
- None of that augers well for a product commensurate with the effort, time & money invested.
(Also the avatars often turn into spaghetti
)
Fond memories of player characters folding themselves, disappearing into nothing but eyeballs, or noodling into eldrich nightmares.