Realm Reborn = downgrade?

[Skies]

Alright I did not read the entire thread (stopped at page 6) because it's kind of long-winded and devolved into a discussion on wether the game being in a pre-alpha state in the demonstration means you should worry or not.

But basically, do you guys KNOW why they implemented the momentum physics? (which are the leaning/windup/winddown when moving)
It is to mask the lag, you presume that it takes a moment for your character to start moving because of the movement initiation animation, when in reality the animation is there to mask the time it takes between your character moving on-screen and on the server. If there is, presumably, no lag to mask, why have those animations when everything they do is blur wether or not your input actually was registered?
Let's take the one most difficult problem to solve here: You want the controls to be precise, if you let go of the forward button, you need to stop moving immediately. If you have a stopping momentum, you take a step further ahead, slowing down, when you stop moving.
You need to stop moving when you let go of the button. You need to take one extra step to play the animation. You only know the player wants to stop moving when he lets go of the button.
When the hell do you play the animation? Answer that.

Also to the goober who said that the camera is locked behind your character, be more mindful and pay more attention. Watch the HD presentation video of gamescom, which if I remember right was shown on the second day. After Yoshida has switched over to Dragoon AF, heading down a ramp, he keeps running but turns the camera leftwards sufficiently so that the camera's focused on the character's right shoulder, showing the scenery to his left, while still running without changing direction. Go look it up again.

Good heavens.

[Shougun]

[Removed because its long - and I wanted to save screen space]

Playing the animation is easy still. Pressing down, start animation 1 phase into animation 2, letting up, phase animation 2 into animation 3. When your character stops he doesn't have to rigidly stop - if you want to see a work of animations go play an Assassins Creed or watch #3 coming out. Ubisoft has got thousands of animations on that guy lol.

[Skies]

Playing the animation is easy still. Pressing down, start animation 1 phase into animation 2, letting up, phase animation 2 into animation 3. When your character stops he doesn't have to rigidly stop - if you want to see a work of animations go play an Assassins Creed or watch #3 coming out. Ubisoft has got thousands of animations on that guy lol.

Yes, but the stop animation, animation 3 as you mention, has one more step on it, one last bit of forward movement.
Are you suggesting the character simply marches in place for that, 'air pedalling'? Because far as I see, that would be the only way to keep the tight control and the stop animation.

[Shougun]

Yes, but the stop animation, animation 3 as you mention, has one more step on it, one last bit of forward movement.
Are you suggesting the character simply marches in place for that, 'air pedalling'? Because far as I see, that would be the only way to keep the tight control and the stop animation.

For that I could suggest a few things.

Make it actually force one more step, this would make running more realistic (go run and try to stop instantly.. dont hurt yourself please lol)

Shorten the animation on the feet step and include the lean back as a symbol of stopping the momentum (lean back is already in current game - you would see a tiny lean back and step but it would make no difference in x and y).

Add a -timed- time difference in animation 1 and 3 so that when phasing in and out you've only moved as far as you have run though it may appear you have taken a step your character was already at the point in memory (no control gained or lost, just an appearance of a step).


I "think" they are doing more of an example three in the current game.

[Zaireeka2025]

...do you guys KNOW why they implemented the momentum physics? (which are the leaning/windup/winddown when moving)
It is to mask the lag, you presume that it takes a moment for your character to start moving because of the movement initiation animation, when in reality the animation is there to mask the time it takes between your character moving on-screen and on the server. If there is, presumably, no lag to mask, why have those animations when everything they do is blur wether or not your input actually was registered?
Let's take the one most difficult problem to solve here: You want the controls to be precise, if you let go of the forward button, you need to stop moving immediately. If you have a stopping momentum, you take a step further ahead, slowing down, when you stop moving.
You need to stop moving when you let go of the button. You need to take one extra step to play the animation. You only know the player wants to stop moving when he lets go of the button.
When the hell do you play the animation? Answer that.

Is this something you heard officially from SE as for the reasons why such a fluid animation feature that is used in all the best AAA titles is being used in FFXIV 1.xx? To mask animation lag or latency? I never read such a quote. Are you a game developer? Even if it was a good excuse to put the animation cues in, why take them out when with such good response to controls now, there would be no reason why as soon as you press the key to move once again it could simply overwrite the previous animation sequence with the new key command to move forward like most games do. The only person that needs to know the player stopped moving is you, the one pressing the keys. Nobody else cares when you start or stop running. You should know when you are or aren't pressing the key, its not the animation that determines that. When it comes to gameplay/battle, the only thing that could hamper throwing up a spell or attack is the lag, not the animation. And with no more lag, no more problem. Animation sequences can easily be replaced/overwritten by instant key presses client-side no problem. To answer your question, the animation is played when the keys are pressed, any animation sequence after letting go doesn't affect gameplay at all when lag isn't an issue anymore... which ARR claims to fix.

i.e. Press UP key --> Move forward; Release UP key --> Stop for 2 second animation sequence; Press UP key after 1 second --> Overwrite previous animation sequence to stopping, instantly replacing with running forward again.

With no lag issues, this process no longer gets disrupted, thus no reason to take out the start/stop animation. Guild Wars 2 has no problem with this.

Also to the goober who said that the camera is locked behind your character, be more mindful and pay more attention. Watch the HD presentation video of gamescom, which if I remember right was shown on the second day. After Yoshida has switched over to Dragoon AF, heading down a ramp, he keeps running but turns the camera leftwards sufficiently so that the camera's focused on the character's right shoulder, showing the scenery to his left, while still running without changing direction. Go look it up again.

Good heavens.

What this goober meant was that the controls weren't literally and permanently locked behind the character with no way to pan the camera, but that the default camera when not manually moving the camera has changed in ARR Pre-Alpha videos to show that the camera is setup the same way all other MMO's use the camera following behind the character instead of the current controller-friendly fixed camera independent of which direction the character faces. Current FFXIV lets the character run directly to the camera until the player decides to rotate the camera. ARR is showing that by simply turning the character, the camera turns with him/her. Not sure if you understood that.

[Neptune]

Do you assume this from the video, or did they stated it as a fact of 2.0?

If so, can you link?

Because if that's the case FFXIV will end up feeling like just another generic mmo, and yeah you're right, a discussion about this is really needed.

Look carefully at the animations in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwenu...&hd=1&t=10m43s

Watch while he's fighting, how he never moves left, right or back, only strafes and backsteps. And watch again while he's running down the path and turning. Only running straight ahead with the camera panning.