The Elder Scrolls Online

Utnayan

Utnayan

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tesotester_sl said:
Once they get another pass on animations they'll probably have some longer combat videos. Right now the interrupt to block and a few other basic parts of the animation still needs work.
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Wait, are you admitting yet that there never was an animations pass like you originally said? Or that the other pass wasn't good and they need to do another one. Excatly how many animation passes are they going to do? Denaut, how many animation passes have you seen in your lifetime?

You're a funny guy Tesotester. You're a funny guy.
Shill

6+ months to release not many games are showing much at all.
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6+ months before launch and WoW had already lifted the NDA and was damn near in open beta.

I wonder how many animation passes they did.
 
Blackwulf

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No, Ut, not trolling. Just said it looks decent. Nothing shocking about that statement. Looked like an ES game to me and a fun monster to fight. Graphics were good enough that I'd not veto the game based on them.
 
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tesotester_sl

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Much improved does not mean ready or perfect. They were much improved. Still need work. You mean to tell me that the very first pass on every single thing done should be perfect and ready for release?


WoW was certainly in better shape 6months out. The game was more or less ready to ship. I wish more games would follow their lead.

Shill? Don't think so. I can and have said plenty of things wrong with the game. You however are a jilted lover. Care to go off the deep end again or did you take your meds today?
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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tesotester_sl said:
Much improved does not mean ready or perfect. They were much improved. Still need work. You mean to tell me that the very first pass on every single thing done should be perfect and ready for release?
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No. I am telling you that the 11gb patch you saw was fucking art assets for other zones and had nothing to do with an animation pass. Considering the animators are creating the shit you just saw released and have about 50% of their content lock to finish before September before they give a pass to fucking anything in the game.

"Hey guys here is a really shitty video of a really shitty mob in a shitty swamp with horrible character animations 6 years into development, this is what we are showing, because it's 6 months before release and other games did it except the most successful MMORPG of all time, wait for the animations pass and then watch it again! It's going to so rock"

Holy shit. You and blackwulf bring a whole new level of stupid to the thread with every single comment you make.

Both of you fuckers should go apply for a job with Harrison over at Microsoft. They need a couple spinsters to circumvent their PR problems with used game lockdown.
 
Denaut

Denaut

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Utnayan_sl said:
Wait, are you admitting yet that there never was an animations pass like you originally said? Or that the other pass wasn't good and they need to do another one. Excatly how many animation passes are they going to do? Denaut, how many animation passes have you seen in your lifetime?
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Full stem to stern pass by the mid-late point in a cycle? Never.

Animation work is among the most expensive and time consuming on a project. There is alwayswaymore animation work to be done than the resources you have, so that time is controlled carefully. If something is especially egregious it might be tweaked and on extremely rare occasion redone. But that always comes at the cost of something new.

Every once in a while, if you convince the animator how cool it would be, you might be able to sneak in a new animation for something you want. That is always a fun victory.
 
Blackwulf

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Eh, I thought it looked pretty good, for those few second they showed. Certainly wouldn't say "shitty." You sound pretty angry and crazy, though.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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^^ Stay out of this, rookie. Take the bench. Old Ut is back for about 5 hours to handle the shill.

Uh oh Tesotester. The big boys know what they are talking about.

\/\/ I said, stay out of this, rookie.
 
Denaut

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To clarify, the words "animation pass" aren't being used correctly in this thread. We have been using it to mean, "adjust, make better, or redo every animation in the game." Inthatcontext a project at TESO's life cycle would never get that as it is pre-production work to set baseline quality.

Now, what an animation pass ACTUALLY means is that someone, usually a producer or maybe an animation lead (rarely the animator themselves as their time is much too valuable) looks through all of the animations and picks out the very worst that stick out to have brought up to the baseline quality. This is usually only a handful, single digit %'s. That is what an animation pass actually is, and in that context it will probably happen 2-5 times during a project.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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/\ Oh for sure. Unfortunately Testotester's post was a blanket statement eluding to the fact that animations were much improved across the game. Either way....

tesotester_sl said:
did you take your meds today?
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I would have to ask you the same question when a supposed "Not insider" tester gets confused seeing 11gb of art assets for black marsh and skyrim getting pushed and thinking it had anything to do with a quality patch considering they arenowhere near content lock, and animators are still catching up on your little lizard friends there in the swamp (Including the lead).
 
Blackwulf

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Denaut, is it possible that a lot of animations could be cheap "canned" or "placeholder" animations and are being replaced in waves with custom animations? Just a thought I had, I have no experience with this stuff, but I think I've heard the argument used before.
 
Grim1

Grim1

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Blackwulf_sl said:
No, Ut, not trolling. Just said it looks decent. Nothing shocking about that statement. Looked like an ES game to me and a fun monster to fight. Graphics were good enough that I'd not veto the game based on them.
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Yeah, it looks fine to me too, for what it is. But it really doesn't show much, very little in fact, which is a concern.

When are they going to open up the floodgates and actually give us something meaty to judge I wonder. Because at this point I still haven't seen anything that gives me a real feel for the game in any way.
 
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ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl

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Just from my limited understanding of the animation world, I've got to agree with Denaut's explanation. Animation really is extremely resource intensive. Another possible explanation for "animation pass" is much like other art assets, animators often render their work in high definition, a high number of avars, and more frames per sequence than really needed then "tone it down" for the actual in-game animations because that shit is resource intensive and often times animators are working on strict memory budgets.
 
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tesotester_sl

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Ut, the large download was client re download and the sizes where similar. I don't recall how much bigger maybe 600m. The animations were improved. Specifically most of the weapons no longer had an animation lock when blocking while in an attack. Mobs can bleed, shudder and/or react when hit. The actual animations themselves were smoother and less jumpy and felt like there was more contact. Running was improved it was ridiculous. World graphics were also improved.

The ones that still need work are weapons like Bow which are still raw. Going down stairs is more like falling depending on how steep the stairs are. Jumping while in regular movement isn't bad but when you sprint its currently slowing you down when you jump which just feels really wrong. There are still some animation locks on certain abilities that need to be removed. So far they've been very quick to respond to issues, will that continue? We'll see.

I'm not in the industry so not familiar with the exact jargon or meaning of words. Just providing what I saw if you want to nitpick by all means continue. The only conspiracy is in your head. Like I said on cake I'll gladly shit all over this fucking thing if it stagnates and doesn't improve. From my seat, actually having played the game, there is enough time to release a really good game. Will it get there? Time will tell.
 
Denaut

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ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:
Just from my limited understanding of the animation world, I've got to agree with Denaut's explanation. Animation really is extremely resource intensive. Another possible explanation for "animation pass" is much like other art assets, animators often render their work in high definition, a high number of avars, and more frames per sequence than really needed then "tone it down" for the actual in-game animations because that shit is resource intensive and often times animators are working on strict memory budgets.
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The make them really big and scaling them down is more of a texture thing. You could theoretically do it for animations as well, but more commonly that kind of scaling is only used forLODingand up close you see the full animation. It works well because you literally can't see the small bones (like fingers) at a distance.

The major difference is that that while making huge textures isn't that much more time consuming than the smaller ones (and is in some cases easier) even slightly higher resolution animation rigs are much more expensive, so if they are made you are almost certainly going to see them.
 
Denaut

Denaut

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The running and jumping animations are two of the few that are actually likely to get a few passes simply because everyone sees them all the time. Other than that, any overall changes or improvements to the animations won't come from the animations themselves but probably from the part of the system that blends them and also maybe from the state machine (although that can be tricky to change as well).
 
Sabbat

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tesotester_sl said:
Ut, the large download was client re download and the sizes where similar. I don't recall how much bigger maybe 600m. The animations were improved. Specifically most of the weapons no longer had an animation lock when blocking while in an attack. Mobs can bleed, shudder and/or react when hit. The actual animations themselves were smoother and less jumpy and felt like there was more contact. Running was improved it was ridiculous. World graphics were also improved.

The ones that still need work are weapons like Bow which are still raw. Going down stairs is more like falling depending on how steep the stairs are. Jumping while in regular movement isn't bad but when you sprint its currently slowing you down when you jump which just feels really wrong. There are still some animation locks on certain abilities that need to be removed. So far they've been very quick to respond to issues, will that continue? We'll see.

I'm not in the industry so not familiar with the exact jargon or meaning of words. Just providing what I saw if you want to nitpick by all means continue. The only conspiracy is in your head. Like I said on cake I'll gladly shit all over this fucking thing if it stagnates and doesn't improve. From my seat, actually having played the game, there is enough time to release a really good game. Will it get there? Time will tell.
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None of this post means anything at all.

Terrible animations in a great game will make the game feel a little off, but you'll get use to it. Great animations in a terrible game will make... a terrible game that people will drop faster than you can say SWTOR.

PS: 6 months out, GW2 had more videos showing animation and combat than even WoW had.

PPS: Sprint slowing down while jumping is very common, there's this thing called Gravity and it's brother from another mother called Inertia.
 
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tesotester_sl

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Sprinting should net you a longer jump. It does not. You simply slow down immediately and suddenly. Which needs to be fixed.

I was also in the GW2 beta and it was nothing to write home about. Lots of bitching about performance issues and cpu utilization right up until a week before release.

The animations have improved a good deal and will likely continue to improve. They are not the only thing being worked on and like I've said many times already while the game needs a lot of work still many of the big things are done right.
 
Pyros

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tesotester_sl said:
I was also in the GW2 beta and it was nothing to write home about. Lots of bitching about performance issues and cpu utilization right up until a week before release.
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Regardless of the state of the game or how it was received or your personnal taste, the fact is GW2 had a ton more content being shown to everyone many months before the game was even close to release, probably because they were very confident in what they could show. Classes had pages on the website with videos of a lot of the skills(similar to that monster video TESO just made, only they had dozens), there were a few trailers and there was all the freaking previews from various websites that they made at E3 and shit like that, for almost 2 years in a row(they had an initial version with only starting zones and no asura/sylvari/mesmer yet, then the year after the convention build had asura/sylvari then a few months later it had mesmers).

Maybe TESO will start at this E3 and actually release shit that reflects the game instead of canned short videos made of nothing. Hell I hope for them because if they don't they'll need all the fanboys and shills they can get to convince people they're not hiding the shittiest mmo to have ever been released by a large company. If they do, well I guess we'll at least be able to judge based on facts which is nice. Doesn't mean they're out of the woods just yet though.
 
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