Greetings, glorious testers!
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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
"Trying to help"
Let me give you some advice, as someone who has been paying attention to the content coming out every month. Its not helping to come in, without having experienced the game, and tell the devs exactly why you are right and everyone else is wrong. Steven has a vision, and its alpha 1.
https://knightsofember.com/forums/members/winner909098.54
To be fair, @oophus never said, "I am right and you guys need to do this." They only said "I suggest" and "I'm asking for them to consider". We've definitely had people who insist that the developers MUST do something and they are fools if they don't (such as allowing people to opt out of PvP totally, or have open PvP without corruption, or allow players to compose music in-game, stuff like that). I don't see anything nearly that aggressive or insistent here. This seems like a mischaracterization.
Its way more helpful to try and give out ideas and suggestions than comments like this, where you speak for the devs. Thats bullshit. Let them come in an speak for themselves instead.
Developers often utilize ideas used for X topic to suddenly find ways for Y topic simply because they have the ability to think outside the box - with the knowledge of what their game can and can not do.
Its like looking at a systems tutorial for a new feature within Unreal Engine. The tutorial may be based on something that is not relative to the game they are developing, but it may be used in different ways that IS directly related to the game they are developing. Thus the tutorial have its value anway. So does all suggestions in this forum. Good or bad. They can all be steared in any direction, and should be read as the initial though - the first draft of something.
The point of a forum is to discuss the topic that is there in the first place. People may agree, or dissagree with it, but then words should reflect that, with reasoning behind it. Not that "it sucks". "Its alpha!" or random comments that have no value for the devs when they read around in here.
There is a portion of another video they talked about how it feels floaty and making it feel better showing them in the editor hitting a guy with a hammer but couldn't find the video right away.
No, in this video we see the animators working in some of the mainstream 3D package programs which in this case is Autodesk Maya. Btw the animators are fantastic! They've got a really talented bunch of animators, and the work it self looks wonderful!
What this thread is about is what happens next. After the animators have done their job, their work is exported out from the program Autodesk Maya/Motionbuilder etc into the game engine - Unreal Engine and tested in a test-environment to see how it plays - Its this step that would be compiled and testet rapidly only to a select few testers outside of their studio. But only if they are still testing different types of how the animations is exported and imported.
Like as you can see in the video, a lot of animations include movement in world-coordinates, instead of it standing still at the same spot like some of the walk-cycles. When the characters move like that, and that animation is imported as is, they are forced to include animation-locking to last as long as the animation plays once a button is pressed. Instead I want that animation segment imported in smaller segments, and instead introduce smaller combo's for example.
I know some of this is implemented like I want, but its an easy example just to describe some ways in how they implement animation and how it plays out for us when we play the game.
If you take a look at the video you showed me at 1:30, you'll see a longer animation with 3 attacks.
Option 1:
Export out that entire animation in one file.
That means that if we press a button, that whole sequence is played out while we have to watch it. We can't do much if we regret to have started it for example of the enemy have already jumped away.
Option 2:
Export out that animation in segments where they split it out between each attack. This way we have to press three times to see that whole animation in quick succession as a "combo" style attack.
Btw, from looking at that animation I know they've chosen option 2. This is because between each attack, the animator makes sure that he ends up in a stance that is easily blended between this to his natural "standing" pose animation.
Option 3:
Same as option 2, but you separate the rig in two or more parts. One for the upper body and one for the lower body, and you implement them together in the game engine. But this time you include procedural animation. Procedural animation is "animation" or movement that the game engine itself takes care of. An example of this is ragdoll physics. But this can be implemented in other ways too. For example if you hit a shield through hit-detection and gets blocked, physics can take over and push the arms back for example for 10-20 frames before he is back in his "rest-pose", or at the end of that animation that he was currently "playing".
The testing environment would be to test out different kinds of system design for how the animations is utilized, in combination with procedural animation which can be used for a ton of different stuff.
They are pushing procedural systems all over the game, except for the animation and combat system, which is a shame imo. The node system and how the towns are laid down is for example heavily controlled by a procedural system to make them as unique as possible. Having procedural animation blended in with hand-made animation can do kinda the same thing. Instead of a known "stagger" animation, a procedural system can handle those situations for example on top of the "stagger" animation, to make each hit feel "heavy" and unique.
A perfect example to show for when procedural animation would do so, so much for something. The character model that rides this lizzard is way too stiff, but thats becaue the length in such animations have to be short to be looped. So there isn't much to be done with it if they don't change the lizzards animation too.
But with procedural animation, they can blend in some physics in the upper body. That means that when the lizzard turns right, the upper body of the character would naturally be swung a bit to the left. If the lizzard brakes, the character sways forward, etc. And procedural animation can also make the hands seam more "alive" to follow the movements of the lizard a bit more, instead of them holding their hands right out all the time.
I agree with you
1; I found that he doesn't provide useful topics like developers at all, and he doesn't care about it, just like paddling
2; I am puzzled by the developers in this open test. It is the goodness of the future test game. Share the progress of the game with you and talk with you about the improvement in order to obtain a better game environment. Everyone watching?
3; Those who can provide more opinions on the game may be partly wrong, but maybe partly, no one is perfect. If everyone is perfect, there is no need to open the test.
4; Do developers always stick to their own ideas, instead of looking at how others think. At present, many game developers are like this, and the people in the forum hope that AOC developers are like this
Some of them do a great job in the combat system. The AOC staff replied to me before. In the combat system, they feel that they are very good at this idea and the progress is good, so I feel that XD we are in the wrong place.
Byeee! Don't feel you need to come back!
I hope Intrepid is working on it; they know they have stiff competition, especially after Amazon New World went full blast into talking up a better combat system.
I want to hope that the things that we have seen are just placeholder. Currently im not seeing a realistic fantasy mmo within their combat. Im seeing, over the top particle animations, that leave the character out of place. When a character hits a monster, the receiving monster's animation dates back to WoW vanilla. And the overall levitate into the air animations are just not my cup of tea.
But we will see.
I mean, we absolutely can say that. I am not sure why we would say it, because there is literally no one at Intrepid that would consider the combat finished.
You may as well walk in to a car factory, look at a car still on the production line and proclaim that you don't think it is ready to drive yet.
Ok, that aside, your OP was in no way a terrible idea.
If something needs to be done, test, adjust, test, perfect is all you're asking for from one step to the next before moving on down the line to later skills.
But given how much Steven has recognised the importance of how combat feels it's very daft to assume that this is not something that he hasn't already given a lot of thought to/ already implemented.
By the time it gets to the pre-alpha testers and beyond, it will have already gone through so many trials and tests amongst the devs at least..... and THEY ALL ARE PLAYERS.
It is a little kind of insulting to suggest that they haven't been focussed on this, as to whether they would listen to the community if at the end of pre-alpha everyone hates the combat, of course they would.
Because they are not (mainly) doing this for money, but doing it because THEY want to love playing it themselves.