Remove black screen fade when taking resurrection

Hi all, this was just a random thought I had about the black screen that fades in and out when you accept a resurrection from another player, is it really necessary? It's a very minor inconvenience when in a raid for example, but healer LB3 doesn't have this screen effect. I can only imagine the difference here is that LB3 resurrection doesn't teleport your character, and because of that the teleport screen fade is just something technical.

I'm curious to see what people think of it, would you prefer your rez to not include the screen fade?

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Originally Posted by ArcaneToast

I can only imagine the difference here is that LB3 resurrection doesn't teleport your character, and because of that the teleport screen fade is just something technical.

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Exactly. LB3 raises you right where you are while normal raise teleports you to the caster first, hence the mini loading screen.

I guess the point the OP is making is "why is there the mini-loading screen at all?" If they don't want to change how raise works (raised character teleported to the mage's position) - they could remove the blackout screen by just making raise act like a Rescue-Raise. Pull the character to you, then raise them. Done. No need for that screen.

Personally, having the screen blackout means you might miss the next mechanic's tells - and then you might wind up dead again anyway if rez invuln wears off before the telegraph does. Not being able to see what is going on during that time can put a player in a rez loop.

I think this is a decent idea however since we're talking about adjusting raises, can we get some sort of indicator as the person being raised where we will be getting up? I'd like to know if where I will be standing is covered in fire or not.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Exactly. LB3 raises you right where you are while normal raise teleports you to the caster first, hence the mini loading screen.

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If that bit of distance warrants a loadscreen, the engine will never support their supposed 10 years of content

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Originally Posted by Shinkuno

If that bit of distance warrants a loadscreen, the engine will never support their supposed 10 years of content

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I'm willing to bet that I could find someone saying about the same 10 years ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Originally Posted by dspguy

If they don't want to change how raise works (raised character teleported to the mage's position) - they could remove the blackout screen by just making raise act like a Rescue-Raise. Pull the character to you, then raise them. Done. No need for that screen.

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They can't. It doesn't work that way. Movement abilities (Rescue, Jump, Shukuchi , etc) are just that. Movement. They're all still tied to the ground and everything on it. Ever try to Shukuchi over or Rescue someone across a death puddle or a gap in a platform? Yeah... That's why they can't just make Raise work like Rescue. Otherwise you'd try to raise someone on the opposite Diamond platform and the corpse would just slide off into the sky.

As for why even short range teleports require a loading screen in the first place, who knows? Personally my guess is either old tech, an anti-botting mechanic (trying to curb teleport hacks), or both, but really it could be anything.

its probably a PS3 limitation was that overlooked when the ps3 was phased out, and yes i agree it needs to be removed

I think it might be visually jarring to have your camera suddenly snap over somewhere else when you get revived, and that's probably why they chose to do a "fade out, fade in" effect to smooth the transition. Maybe it's also somewhat symbolic of your character's fade into unconsciousness, then waking up somewhere else? I suppose they could do a smooth camera pan over to the new location too, but what can I say, the fade to black just doesn't bother me.

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Originally Posted by Xirean

I think this is a decent idea however since we're talking about adjusting raises, can we get some sort of indicator as the person being raised where we will be getting up? I'd like to know if where I will be standing is covered in fire or not.

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Just walk out of the fire, then. When you are revived, you are temporarily invincible for a few seconds. That invincibility goes away instantly if you use any abilities, but you can still move around. So, best thing you can do before getting back into the fight is wait for someone to heal you up before you even think of attacking anything.

Would be especially good in PvP.

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Originally Posted by Fyrebrand

Just walk out of the fire, then. When you are revived, you are temporarily invincible for a few seconds. That invincibility goes away instantly if you use any abilities, but you can still move around. So, best thing you can do before getting back into the fight is wait for someone to heal you up before you even think of attacking anything.

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The fire is more of a symbolic example. If "just walk out of the bad" worked for every scenario then I would agree, but that invulnerability buff doesn't protect you from instant death effects, such as a train smacking you in the face during Nier. An indicator showing you and only you exactly where you would respawn would be very helpful to avoid immediately dying again.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

They can't. It doesn't work that way. Movement abilities (Rescue, Jump, Shukuchi , etc) are just that. Movement. They're all still tied to the ground and everything on it. Ever try to Shukuchi over or Rescue someone across a death puddle or a gap in a platform? Yeah... That's why they can't just make Raise work like Rescue. Otherwise you'd try to raise someone on the opposite Diamond platform and the corpse would just slide off into the sky.

As for why even short range teleports require a loading screen in the first place, who knows? Personally my guess is either old tech, an anti-botting mechanic (trying to curb teleport hacks), or both, but really it could be anything.

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Fair points.

Sounds like PS2 limitations though (FFXI reference)

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

They can't. It doesn't work that way.

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They can. The way it works can be changed. That's what programmers are for. There's no way the code that currently handles it is so complicated it can't easily be modified to raise and move your character safely without blacking the screen, because that's exactly what it already does while the screen is black. The black screen is 100% an aesthetic decision to prevent you from seeing your camera snap to the new location. It's not a technical issue. It can be removed.

My response was specifically talking about why it doesn't work the same way as Rescue, but sure, let's argue semantics.

Obviously it could be changed. The devs could do literally anything if they wanted to to spend the time and resources on it. But what could be doesn't change how it works right now. Right now raise moves you with a teleport rather than moving your corpse along the ground, and unless that changes (and it probably won't for the reasons I mentioned above) it's unlikely the screen fade with go away.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Right now raise moves you with a teleport rather than moving your corpse along the ground

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What do you think a teleport-raise is though?

1. The feather animation happens.
2. Your character model becomes invisible.
3. The screen fades out.
4. Your character position is updated to the new position.
5. Your camera is moved to the new position.
6. The screen fades back in.
7. Your character model becomes visible.
8. Your character does the getting up animation.

What is a movement ability?

1. The rescue/manipulation/smokebomb animation happens.
2. (Optional) Your character model becomes invisible.
3. The screen fades out.
4. Your character position is updated to the new position.
5. Your camera is moved to the new position.
6. The screen fades back in.
7. (Optional) Your character model becomes visible.
8. Your character does the staggering/reappearing animation.

Shukuchi does exactly what Raise does but without the black screen. Making one more like the other would be a trivial change.

Don't forget that Raise also places a 1 minute debuff on your character, provides a chunk of time during which you cannot be targeted for damage, and removes all other debuffs for your character. It isn't just moving from point A to point B. The game is doing more than one thing during that blackout.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Don't forget that Raise also places a 1 minute debuff on your character, provides a chunk of time during which you cannot be targeted for damage, and removes all other debuffs for your character. It isn't just moving from point A to point B. The game is doing more than one thing during that blackout.

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That's all trivial stuff as well, unimportant to whether or not the screen goes black. The game can set or unset whatever buffs it wants on you regardless.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

That's all trivial stuff as well, unimportant to whether or not the screen goes black. The game can set or unset whatever buffs it wants on you regardless.

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Not if the programming is set up to remove your character from the instance, rebuild it using standard 'raise' modifiers and then send you back into the instance. You do that 'teleport' thing when you accept the raise every time, after all. That, and the raise isn't instantaneous either.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Shukuchi does exactly what Raise does but without the black screen.

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It does not.

Abilities like Rescue and Shukuchi physically move you along the ground same as if you walked, just faster and with a special animation. That's why you fall off and die if you try to Rescue someone across a hole in a platform and get damaged if you Shukuchi over a ground AoE, and the like. Raise doesn't work like that. You can raise people to places they normally couldn't get to. Across platforms on Diamond, up onto the lamp post in Kugane, etc, meaning the game is actually teleporting you rather than making you move along the ground super fast. THAT is the difference.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Not if the programming is set up to remove your character from the instance, rebuild it using standard 'raise' modifiers and then send you back into the instance. You do that 'teleport' thing when you accept the raise every time, after all.

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It doesn't do that. That would be a whole lot of unnecessary steps that are obviously handled by the very simple application of Weakness or Brink of Death debuffs. Your character data is not destroyed and rebuilt when you raise. The model just becomes invisible, gets repositioned, and then made visible again.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

That, and the raise isn't instantaneous either.

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The movement of your invisible character model is, but that's still a largely irrelevant point. See my timelines in the previous posts, which clearly account for the steps where animations happen, separate from the movement of the character and camera. What happens before and after the movement is not important. This thread is concerned with the blackout and what happens during the time the character and camera are moved. Changing that section of the timeline would not have any effect on the rest of the time line.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Abilities like Rescue and Shukuchi physically move you along the ground same as if you walked, just faster and with a special animation.

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I promise you that point is not as important as you think it is. Whether the character model moves at a non-instantaneous pace or an instantaneous one is immaterial; in any case it is ultimately a matter of (1) setting a new character position, (2) setting the camera position to match, and (3) moving the character and the camera to their new positions. Whether you ignore the terrain or not does not matter to whether or not the screen needs to go black: it does not need to; that it does is an aesthetic choice, not a technical one.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Across platforms on Diamond

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Like how the teleporters in the Diamond Weapon arena teleport you across from one ship to the other without blacking the screen or killing you in the center void? <== THIS is how simple it would be to give us a raise that moves the camera without blacking the screen. Thanks for the example.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Your character data is not destroyed and rebuilt when you raise
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All current debuffs are removed. Health points are increased from 0 to 10%. The rez debuff is applied. Your gear takes a decided hit. You definitely hear the 'teleport' sound, followed by the 'rez' animation.

And you and I have absolutely no idea of what code is written to do all of that, although I conceive it as destroying and rebuilding your character and you do not.

The other 'teleport' examples brought up do not involve changing your character in any way, shape, or form. They do not play the 'rez' animation for your character. So, it's not doing what you think it's doing.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

in any case it is ultimately a matter of (1) setting a new character position, (2) setting the camera position to match, and (3) moving the character and the camera to their new position.

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Bolded is the important point here - the reason for the black screen in its entirety is to create a seamless transition from one point to another. It's a pretty game industry standard effect to mask extremely jarring movements over long distances, some developers simply have better ways to mask the transition with environmental tricks (Dark Souls does a whole bunch of these transition trickeries, for example). It's the same reason there's black screens when you go through things like portals in The Chrysalis, Halicarnassus in O3's desert maze, etc. The actual area you're warped to exists right next to the arena field you fight in and could theoretically get moved there without a load screen in 0.5s, but the movement is insanely jarring. Which is the ultimate point here why raise has the fade out - it creates a much more smoother, pleasant on the eye transition.

However, there is a crucial point that you get wrong about your shukuchi example - shukuchi is not an instantaneous movement, your character slides to the location quickly, on top of the camera follows you during the slide to match your character's movement. This is extremely important, as it creates the exact same seamless transition from one point to another that's pleasing to the eye. With raise being point A -> point B with absolutely zero interpolated locations inbetween, there is no opportunity to create the fluid motion from one location to another. That's also without factoring in that the theoretical highest distance for shukuchi is only 20yalms, whereas with raise you can get raised 30y away, creating an extremely jarring camera snap from point A to point B.

As far as potentially emulating rescue and causing the body to slide instead of warp? I doubt that's possible - we already know dead bodies can interact with stages elements (like if a diamond weapon platform gets destroyed, the dead body falls off of it and gets respawned elsewhere. I have zero doubts trying to slide the body over instead of warping it would cause the body to interact with field elements like pits/etc and cause a massive delay/issue in the respawning process.

For another example of why the developers do the fadeout - why do you think animation developers bother to animate the frames of the character moving in between one location and another, even when they're moving at high speeds? Or even during instant teleporting like in DBZ, why they always leave & create distortion effects at their start & end locations? Simply having a character start in one location and end in another is extremely uncanny for the vast majority. If you want an in-game example of something that looks extremely uncanny of instant warping, go do Elusive jump off a cliff with an area you can land on below. Your character will instantaneously snap to the bottom of the cliff, but the movement itself looks insanely wrong.

In the couple of gaming projects I've worked on at AAA studios, anytime we had instantaneous teleporting and hadn't put in the fading yet, the game testers would always complain & submit bug tickets regarding it citing that it looked wrong/broken - at the end of the day, it all comes down to the perception of smooth movement or the suspension of disbelief of moving from one spot to another without making it look uncanny.

Couldn't it be solved by changing ress to it resses the player at their current location, the short invuln covering immunity against death walls and other unpleasant things?
5s should be enough to move your butt out of a death wall, no? Because death walls are currently the only reason why ressing someone where they are would be problematic.

And for the "but people could cheese with it!" - people already "cheese" with ress invuln. Taking a stack with someone at low HP, moving through danger zones unharmed etc.; that is just clever gameplay and making the most out of a death and ress. Nothing bad or cheesy about being able to move out of a death wall for 5s. Not like you want to be in there for any reason or could pull off some crazy stunts that only work in death walls.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Like how the teleporters in the Diamond Weapon arena teleport you across from one ship to the other without blacking the screen or killing you in the center void? <== THIS is how simple it would be to give us a raise that moves the camera without blacking the screen. Thanks for the example.

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Both you and Brightamethyst make great points.

Maybe it is the way it is for the same reason you can't accept party invites while engaged with the marketboard. Spaghetti code that's been around probably since 1.0.

Its a similar issue in PvP making the respawn timer longer than it should be. That said, I think the issue is the game relocating your characters position so I imagine there is a technical reason for it.

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

Bolded is the important point here - the reason for the black screen in its entirety is to create a seamless transition from one point to another. It's a pretty game industry standard effect to mask extremely jarring movements over long distances, some developers simply have better ways to mask the transition with environmental tricks

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Yeah, if you had ever played with some who lagging really bad, when they die their corpse would just rubber banding around the arena, very creepy and ackward. And rescue-res would be the same thing.

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However, there is a crucial point that you get wrong about your shukuchi example - shukuchi is not an instantaneous movement, your character slides to the location quickly, on top of the camera follows you during the slide to match your character's movement. This is extremely important, as it creates the exact same seamless transition from one point to another that's pleasing to the eye. With raise being point A -> point B with absolutely zero interpolated locations inbetween, there is no opportunity to create the fluid motion from one location to another.

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This is another valid point, outside of actual teleport, the game has no actual physical displacement, everything is just extremely fast movement masked with an illusionary animation. Case in point, you can't use DRG jump hope over a ground AOE (you still gonna get the tick even if you never land on it), nor you can use it to hop over a split platform (you just gonna fall down). Without teleportation, there would be no way for a healer to res someone that's not on the same platform of them if there are a split arena.

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

However, there is a crucial point that you get wrong about your shukuchi example - shukuchi is not an instantaneous movement, your character slides to the location quickly, on top of the camera follows you during the slide to match your character's movement. This is extremely important, as it creates the exact same seamless transition from one point to another that's pleasing to the eye. With raise being point A -> point B with absolutely zero interpolated locations inbetween, there is no opportunity to create the fluid motion from one location to another. That's also without factoring in that the theoretical highest distance for shukuchi is only 20yalms, whereas with raise you can get raised 30y away, creating an extremely jarring camera snap from point A to point B.

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It's not important. The timing of the pre-move, move, and post-move can be adjusted so that the movement happens smoothly enough without affecting the total raise sequence timing. Of course an instantaneous camera movement from point A to point B that happens in a single frame would be jarring; that's obviously not what we're asking for here. Let's review the relevant portion of the timeline again.

Currently, here's what is involved in just the movement:

1. The character model becomes invisible.
2. The screen fades to black.
3. The character's position is updated.
4. The camera's position is updated. The camera instantaneously moves to the new poisition.
5. The screen fades in.
6. The character model becomes visible.

There is plenty of time between when character model becomes invisible and when it becomes visible again to move the camera smoothly to the new position instead of fading the screen in and out.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

Maybe it is the way it is for the same reason you can't accept party invites while engaged with the marketboard. Spaghetti code that's been around probably since 1.0.

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We really need to stop blaming everything on "spaghetti code". We're talking about a movement animation. That's all. We're not querying any database tables or making changes to the data structures that could be abused if done in an improper order.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

Yeah, if you had ever played with some who lagging really bad, when they die their corpse would just rubber banding around the arena, very creepy and ackward. And rescue-res would be the same thing.

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That's a non-issue: the character model is invisible during the movement portion of the raise. For everyone who is not the dead person, it wouldn't look any different than it already does. Removing the fade would affect only the dead person because the dead person is the only one who sees the screen fade anyway.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

This is another valid point, outside of actual teleport, the game has no actual physical displacement, everything is just extremely fast movement masked with an illusionary animation. Case in point, you can't use DRG jump hope over a ground AOE (you still gonna get the tick even if you never land on it), nor you can use it to hop over a split platform (you just gonna fall down). Without teleportation, there would be no way for a healer to res someone that's not on the same platform of them if there are a split arena.

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Diamond Weapon example clearly contradicts this. Terrain is irrelevant to the problem.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

We're talking about a movement animation. That's all.

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Except that is not all we're talking about. There are at least four separate things being done during this "movement", including health bar adjustments, removing effects, adding effects and the 'rez' animation itself.

Ignoring those other four things is where you continually go wrong.

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Diamond Weapon example clearly contradicts this.

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Oddly enough, that portal movement does not involve health bar adjustments, removing effects, adding effects and presenting a 'rez' animation. Who'd have thought otherwise?

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Except that is not all we're talking about. There are at least four separate things being done during this "movement", including health bar adjustments, removing effects, adding effects and the 'rez' animation itself.

Ignoring those other four things is where you continually go wrong.

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All the other things are irrelevant to the movement portion. They can happen in their own time. We literally are only talking about the movement part of the raise, from the time the character becomes invisible to the time the character becomes visible again. All the other things that happen do not care about that portion of the sequence.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

All the other things are irrelevant to the movement portion. They can happen in their own time. We literally are only talking about the movement part of the raise, from the time the character becomes invisible to the time the character becomes visible again. All the other things that happen do not care about that portion of the sequence.

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Except that they all occur as part of the movement portion. And have done so since A Realm Reborn was released. The movement was coded along with the animation and the character adjustments.

Look, I get it. You don't want to lose face. To the point where you'll change the argument from "this all occurs as part of the Raise" to "they don't need to do this to cover up the movement", which are not the same arguments.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Except that they all occur as part of the movement portion. And have done so since A Realm Reborn was released. The movement was coded along with the animation and the character adjustments.

Look, I get it. You don't want to lose face. To the point where you'll change the argument from "this all occurs as part of the Raise" to "they don't need to do this to cover up the movement", which are not the same arguments.

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No, they don't happen "as part of the movement potion."

Look, I get it, not everyone here has a graduate degree in computer science. Not everyone understands dependency resolution and task ordering using a topological sort of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). These are concepts I usually introduce in a second semester undergrad data structures and algorithms course and discuss in detail in discrete mathematics.

Here is a DAG showing the raise sequence.

https://i.imgur.com/yhAsDHz.png

Each box is a step in the sequence. Arrows indicate that a ->step cannot happen until after the step-> before it happens. Note that all the buff and HP management really doesn't need to happen in any particular order; the only hard requirement is that they happen after the player accepts the raise and before character control is restored. There may be technical requirements we don't know about regarding the ordering of the buffs and debuffs to prevent strange interactions, but that at worst forces the three buff/debuff steps into a rigid sequence, and that sequence would still not care about the character movement sequence and the camera movement sequence.

If we wanted to linearize the graph, we could do a topological sort. In a topological sort, we arrange all the steps in a single sequence such that all the arrows are pointing from left to right; that is, no step happens unless all the steps that have to happen before it have happened. Here is what appears to be the order that the game uses, based on reviews of raise footage from my raid archives:

https://i.imgur.com/zjiQoC4.png

Note that this is not the only valid topological sort of this graph. The steps can be rearranged freely as long as all the arrows flow in one direction.

Here is a representation of the thread topic:

https://i.imgur.com/X3wQhwf.png

Above, the camera subsequence marked in fuschia, gets replaced with the below camera subsequence marked in green.

And here is a topological sort of that change:

https://i.imgur.com/idnhDnh.png

As you can see, changing the camera sequence from a fade-snap-fade to a smooth movement does not affect anything and does not care about what's happening elsewhere in the sequence. The character model, moving invisibly and instantaneously, does not care about terrain or the limitations of player character movement. The buffs/debuffs do not care at all what is going on with the camera.

The obstacles you keep insisting exist do not exist.

This absolutely, in some ways I wish they changed jump abilities to actually jump off the ground

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

It does not.

Abilities like Rescue and Shukuchi physically move you along the ground same as if you walked, just faster and with a special animation. That's why you fall off and die if you try to Rescue someone across a hole in a platform and get damaged if you Shukuchi over a ground AoE, and the like. Raise doesn't work like that. You can raise people to places they normally couldn't get to. Across platforms on Diamond, up onto the lamp post in Kugane, etc, meaning the game is actually teleporting you rather than making you move along the ground super fast. THAT is the difference.

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At some point I would love to see movement abilities such as jump not use the floor bit I'm sure there arw a myriad of things to consider if they ever changed that.

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Originally Posted by ArcaneToast

At some point I would love to see movement abilities such as jump not use the floor bit I'm sure there arw a myriad of things to consider if they ever changed that.

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it'd break too many things as interesting as it'd be as there are a lot of places that technically have collision as a result of the development process. whether it be the initial designing of things or to future-proof things for the, well, future as well as just the ability to reuse something someplace else (say, a house.)
there's also the fact that a lot of abilities would allow you to bypass certain movement-based puzzles. raise can also bypass stuff but most of those puzzles are in areas there's no way to die without exploiting blu, which ordinarily isn't that big of a deal. either way it would mean reevaluating collisions in quite literally every map, instance, whatever and creating even more infuriating invisible barriers.

also gotta take into consideration whether or not the game actually has a way of perceiving a difference between being up in the air and being on the ground. i was operating under the assumption that, say, flying for example is simply the game stating "move character <x> speed but move the model and camera this high up". you're still technically on the ground, you just *see* yourself above from your perspective as opposed to the engine. in fact a lot of engines don't... really take actual 3d coordinates into consideration or use as little of it as they can to reduce overhead and the amount of data transmitted so everything else - at least a good chunk of it, according to the engine - is simply a 2d plane.