Petition: Keep the Animation!~

[IveraIvalice]

This thread and the arguments being made by the players who are fighting to preserve the "FF feel" as they claim to be, are pathetic. I get you're bored and all since content is lacking currently but wow, to make this much of a deal for something so pointless.. is astounding. Lets be honest the animations aren't even spectacular.

FINALLY smooth gameplay vs the char moving slightly and an extra step when stopping..

that's a no brainer.. but I guess you people have to cry about the dumbest things
GJ wasting 25+ pages and the time you took to write all those pointless posts

i dont know what thread you have been reading but its not this one, where is the talk of FF feel? i havent heard that in this thread at all and if it was mentioned it was probly the really early posts.
you clearly havent read all the way to the end to even know what has been talked about in the last couple pages, because what we have been discussing is feedback to the dev team, no one is bitching or moaning as someone stated in an earlier post.
your just wasting your own time by posting here, this is a thread to discuss keeping the animations.
your generic post of "you guys cry about the dumbest things" "pointless posts" "arguments made by players" shows that you dont even know whats going on here
so how about you read before you post, and when you do, post about something useful
i dont know what you were trying to accomplish here but you didnt help anything

[Rokien]

This thread and the arguments being made by the players who are fighting to preserve the "FF feel" as they claim to be, are pathetic. I get you're bored and all since content is lacking currently but wow, to make this much of a deal for something so pointless.. is astounding. Lets be honest the animations aren't even spectacular.

FINALLY smooth gameplay vs the char moving slightly and an extra step when stopping..

that's a no brainer.. but I guess you people have to cry about the dumbest things
GJ wasting 25+ pages and the time you took to write all those pointless posts

You know, I never once made an FF feel at all in this thread, soooo ya, there was probably 1 or 2 at the most. Get that stick out of your butt.

Animation is important, right now I'm playing gw2, does it have smooth combat? sure, do the animations suck? YES~ When I play games like DA, DA:O, DA2, WoW, Tera, GW, GW2, a lot of other games. I cringe at the fact they are soo lazy to not make it feel like your character is actually in that world instead of a screen going by while you are on a treadmill. I've said it once or twice already, I quit games because of this effect(treadmill effect), that's how much I hate it.
You are probably asking "WTF IS ROKIEN TALKING ABOUT, TREADMILL EFFECT?!"
Instead of just explaining it, I'll link a videos of gw2.

GW2

As you can see, the ground is sliding underneath them. The ground moves faster than the player, this creates a disconnection between you're character and the world. It makes it feel(for me) that you are not actually on the ground, the world is moving around you, not you moving around the world. it's hard to explain, but ya. It REALLY bugs me, and you can see it in FFXIV: ARR in their presentation video as well. That really saddens me. A lot.


I just can't take games with por "aesthetics" seriously.

[Diraco]

....
As you can see, the ground is sliding underneath them. The ground moves faster than the player, this creates a disconnection between you're character and the world. It makes it feel(for me) that you are not actually on the ground, the world is moving around you, not you moving around the world. it's hard to explain, but ya. It REALLY bugs me, and you can see it in FFXIV: ARR in their presentation video as well. That really saddens me. A lot.

How can you not be frustrated with the current version as well? Foot placement is not only NOT synchronized with the ground, half the time your charcter will be floating off the ground altogether! Are there any online games at all that use a system like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2q5kuic6HA

?? (I posted this link in the other thread)
The animations are actually modifed in real time to keep the character's feet exactly on the surface of the ground, no matter if it is sloped, or if the character's speed and direction is changing. This technology is over 4 years old already...

[IveraIvalice]

How can you not be frustrated with the current version as well? Foot placement is not only NOT synchronized with the ground, half the time your charcter will be floating off the ground altogether! Are there any online games at all that use a system like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2q5kuic6HA

?? (I posted this link in the other thread)
The animations are actually modifed in real time to keep the character's feet exactly on the surface of the ground, no matter if it is sloped, or if the character's speed and direction is changing. This technology is over 4 years old already...

not sure if thats possible in the current system. i cant say this is something i specifically know about but i can tell you how regular walking in games work and why this is possible in that video and probly not in the current version. so keep reading if your interested about alittle game development, if not skip this.

the way regular animation works is that someone animates a character walking and the animation is baked, meaning every frame has a key so that every frame is set and when imported into the game engine there is no computer thinking involved in filling in between keyframes.
once the animation is in the game, the feet are set to the ground based on the collisions which are different then the ground plane geometry, thats why if the feet look like their floating sometimes its because the collision of the ground isnt in the exact same place as the ground that you see.
the feet are set by something in the game engine called ground clamping.
for things like stairs the collision is actually a ramp so that its smooth when you walk up them and thats why when you stop on things that are slops it looks like your floating.

this video is showing that the walk animation is there, but that the legs y axis is being ground clamped seperatly in real time. but in order to do this, or at least whats in the video, the collisions need to either be set to every step which adds more collision geometry and is more intensive on the engine or have the actual ground plane terrain geometry set as the collision also, but as you can imagine this is very cpu intensive.
thats one part that makes that possible, and the reason that i believe this video is possible and it might not be in the new game engine is because the legs need to have a part of the rig still attached as its going into the game engine called an ik, the full name is inverse kinematics and it basically turns translation information of one joint into rotating information of the joints its parented to.
an ik runs from the leg to the ankle and when you move the ankle, the computer fills in what the knee and leg do, saves alot of time and is great for animating.
but as i said earlier the animations are usually baked as they go into a game engine and the animation controls are deleted, nothing but the joints and skin remain, and the joints are baked with the animation.
but unity can take a full rigged character with animation controls, so it has the ik in the legs to update these in real time, but thats something that needs to be built into the system, so if the new game engine for ARR doesnt have that capability built in then its not possible.

also the "keeping the character on the ground even if he's changing direction" thing isnt amazing actually, kuz ground clamping only edits the characters Y axis to keep it on the ground and only the Translation of the Y axis, so rotation isnt affected at all, all game engines can do it. oh whoops i forgot, for game engines, up is the Z axis. for films and stuff Y is up.

super long post
hope this was informative at least for those who read

[IveraIvalice]

oh by the way, i wasnt able to see the letter from the producer live III this morning, been looking for it on youtube but all im finding are private links >.> anyone got it somewhere or do i got to wait for the translated version? i havent been able to see the "bad animations" that was mentioned alittle earlier

[Meti]

It's true the gameplay in version 1 was a lacking in some ways, but it's true that what it really had going for it was this weight behind the character you controlled. It made them feel real, somehow, and that's something I haven't experienced in an MMO before. It's only of the things that made me stick with it (all the while complaining about some of the things I didn't like so much). If they're doing a 180 and abandoning that lovely feel that the characters had when you controlled them, that'll be pretty sad.
I just hope they see that players care about these little details a lot, and that they'll find time to put the old animations back, at least in passive mode...

[Ruisu]

I mean you guys did add JUMP just for aesthetics.

Really? I thought they were jumping over fences and the like in the demo at gamescom/PAX/the anniversary. That must have just been me who saw that tidbit, I guess.

I don't care enough about the "realistic animations", but if you do somehow manage to bring them back, you better be asking for feet to be placed on the ground properly, as well. As in if I'm walking on stairs, I should not stand in the air. Same with any inclined terrain. Otherwise you'd just be half assing it.

[Empyrean]

Really? I thought they were jumping over fences and the like in the demo at gamescom/PAX/the anniversary. That must have just been me who saw that tidbit, I guess.

I don't care enough about the "realistic animations", but if you do somehow manage to bring them back, you better be asking for feet to be placed on the ground properly, as well. As in if I'm walking on stairs, I should not stand in the air. Same with any inclined terrain. Otherwise you'd just be half assing it.

Yes, they should do all that too.

[Zaireeka2025]

...you better be asking for feet to be placed on the ground properly, as well. As in if I'm walking on stairs, I should not stand in the air. Same with any inclined terrain. Otherwise you'd just be half assing it.

Finally somebody mentioned this. Not sure why something so basic and prevalent in games gets overlooked. Terrain-friendly foot placement is win.

[Klefth]

Well... that new movement animation did look really out of place on the gameplay showed during the live letter... especially when they showed multiple characters doing emotes (the same ones we currently have) while others ran around...