Character Animations need to take a cue from Aion

[Rconsole]

I found that Character animations in Aion were somwhat lacking, I mean, I couldn't even run in a circle, granted, I only played for a few days but 45 degree angle movements aren't what I'm looking for in an online game. Otherwise, Aion overall looked fantastic.

[Xinitar]

This sounds like a possible limitation in the way the architecture works and would belong on a "wish list of architecture changes." On the other hand, this limitation might make 15 other things 1000 times easier to handle.

I was surprised to hear that so much painstaking handwork goes into doing something that I always thought was done through some kind of mathematical/OO model. Like, to change one thing in the original, and the behavior of all the related copies changes. Maybe no such simulation approach exists, and it's all frame-by-frame handwork.

LoTRO is going strong after nearly 3 years of the public having their hands on it, and easily has another 2-3 years of major influence left. Are architecture changes expected milestones built into the lifecycle of MMOs?

It seems like an MMO must expand and introduce new content to keep interest over time, but more expansion makes it harder and harder to maintain. I wonder what the complexity of maintenance is, or whether it becomes infeasible after a certain point to add anything new.

The other thing is that people get bored playing after rolling the Nth alt, and doing the same quests all over again, and so just decide move onto another game. This is fine for the MMO company, as they can rely on new players coming in to replace the old ones leaving.

I guess it can go one way or the other. Either the MMO spends lots of money constantly expanding its content and staff (to try to keep its advanced players) or it only expands sporadically, losing chunks of them to other games.

There has to be some point at which it's more profitable just to start another MMO rather than just expanding the same one.

[keithianw]

After looking at Aion for a few days, it seems like they sacrificed a lot to have such smooth animation & great looking character (and mob) models.

The ground textures are OK at best, and they don't really do a very good job of covering up how sparse the ground is. Very, very few bushes, grass, plants, etc. It really makes the ground feel flat.

A strange trade-off.

But regardless, yes, the one thing I'm truly impressed with from Aion is the animations (the moving parts are SO smooth), and the quality of their mobs & character models.

The highly stylized art I just can't really get into, though. I like more realism in my fantasy MMORPG's.

Your post is totally inline with my original post. I feel like we are related lol.

[immessedup17]

Aion looks pretty decent to me, but I haven't noticed anything that puts the animations far over the top of this game. LoTRO could always look nicer, but it doesn't look bad.

[keithianw]

Every update, there will be a few texture improvements in the world that don't get mentioned, or some anim polish, or any number of things, just to improve on some of the seven year old assets that are in the game, which often aren't really up to the quality of much of the newer stuff that surrounds them. But it's a bunch of work to replace a man-century or two of previous effort. And when the general perception is that "we're not doing any of that", then it's easy to deprioritize those bits of that that we do want to get to. At least, when things come up, you know what the first thing to go will be...[/QUOTE]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. It was educational. I just think as one other person noted that you are loosing a group of people (though I have no idea how big or small that group is) that take the animations very seriously. For example, one of my friends who loves PVE tried the game, but he hated the animations so much that he left after level 16. I have heard that from a few others as well. Personally, I think they are silly since the animations are good enough not to detract from the beauty and charm of the world. I think it would be worth the effort to do a cost benefit analysis, even a survey, to see if the work effort would be worth it, or if those who left would stay away anyway. I totally understand the delicate balance of not breaking what already works. For me, the animations are lower on the priority list for what I look for, but certainly high enough on the list for continuous improvement. It sounds as if you guys are doing that, but it hasn't reached the point yet where it has been eliminated as a topic of discussion. Thanks again for responding.

[TheOneRinger]

The killer here is that we *do* upgrade things as we go. It's just that there is so much, that the as-you-go upgrades are a drop in the bucket, and you guys don't notice. And even tiny upgrades often grow into something larger than we would want.

A simple for instance: I love my dwarf guard, and I love most of the hauberks, but I hated the hauberks on the dwarves, because their bowlegged idle stance made the hauberks really flare out in an ugly way. The center strip down the middle became this horrible pyramid below the waist. So I asked the animators if they could adjust the idle pose of dwarves to not be so bow-legged.

They did it, but had to adjust a hojillion animations to do so: every emote, and every animation that goes into or out of the idle stance. It ended up being a largish amount of work for something really pretty minor and simple.

And in the end, I don't think anyone noticed. I like it better now that hauberks sit better on dwarves when they're standing around, but I don't think we ended up seriously impacting the way you guys view the game.

You can quibble about that change: you can say that of course it was too minor to notice, or that we could have spent our time better, or that there are so many other things to deal with, but it's a lot easier to call plays after the game. It can be hard to know how much work a "simple" change will entail, it can be hard to figure out if a change is going to be "subtle but impactful" or "an invisible waste of time", and it can be hard to get even something small done when you have so much else to do. In all areas.

Every update, there will be a few texture improvements in the world that don't get mentioned, or some anim polish, or any number of things, just to improve on some of the seven year old assets that are in the game, which often aren't really up to the quality of much of the newer stuff that surrounds them. But it's a bunch of work to replace a man-century or two of previous effort. And when the general perception is that "we're not doing any of that", then it's easy to deprioritize those bits of that that we do want to get to. At least, when things come up, you know what the first thing to go will be...

I would like to thank floon for his once again awesome posts, and I would like to say I did in fact notice this change and I like it a lot. The dwarven figure is now eleven times greater than the other races', as opposed to the previous ten times.

[Aesch]

And in the end, I don't think anyone noticed. I like it better now that hauberks sit better on dwarves when they're standing around, but I don't think we ended up seriously impacting the way you guys view the game.

I notice the toe-tapping when playing music. And that your toe won't tap with harp or horn.
__________________
Team O Meneldor: Osyth, Olave, Ornwen, Oho, Orla
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[Arkarianor]

Yeah, some. Some are just too big and have to wait for the next game. A lot of changes are much bigger simply because when something is live, we have an obligation to not break the live stuff in improving it, which is a lot harder than simply making something.

That's the thing though - MMO's (if I understand it correctly) last far, far longer than normal games due to xpacks, free updates, etc - I wouldn't be surprised if LOTRO lasted 10 years.

However, you can't just make the changes in a sequel like you would for a console game, as there is no sequel, just a series of improvements to the original game.

So do you just continue to work on a game that's becoming more and more outdated and give up on it when it's done to work on a new project, or will there be significant upgrades in an expansion pack in the future?

[Boraxxe]

...I wouldn't be surprised if LOTRO lasted 10 years.

Sheesh, I expect Lotro to last much longer than that!

[floon]

So do you just continue to work on a game that's becoming more and more outdated and give up on it when it's done to work on a new project, or will there be significant upgrades in an expansion pack in the future?

Improvements will undoubtedly happen, but seriously, not on the timescale that the forums operate on: no bi-annual replacement of the avatars and animations, or anything.

[Mikowise]

Yeah, some. Some are just too big and have to wait for the next game.

Middle-earth Online? :P

[Kraggy]

The next game of course is on a console, and all of them after that if Steefel's recent comments are to be believed. Turbine are now a console gaming company from here on in it seems, so PC technology changes won't really be their concern.

[Hyetal]

The next game of course is on a console, and all of them after that if Steefel's recent comments are to be believed. Turbine are now a console gaming company from here on in it seems, so PC technology changes won't really be their concern.

That's fine, I don't want to have to buy a whole new computer every six months to keep playing a game that already exists.

Why should Turbine be expected to do the equivalent of graphically created a whole new game every once in a while to keep upsetting people with unwanted and unneeded change? I mean, to keep the game looking fresh and new?

LOTRO looks great, better than nearly every MMO out there. There's no need to change anything, now or ever.

[jester121]

Middle-earth Online? :P

Silmarillion Online. For $9.95 per month there's no graphics, they just scroll words across your screen until you lose interest.

[TheOneRinger]

Silmarillion Online. For $9.95 per month there's no graphics, they just scroll words across your screen until you lose interest.

EPIC WIN! I would buy it and I believe you just won the thread. (I don't think I've ever seen a non-floon post that looked this awesome in a thread that floon posted in)

[ANTNY25]

Silmarillion Online. For $9.95 per month there's no graphics, they just scroll words across your screen until you lose interest.

You owe me a new keyboard fool (unless this mouthful of tea dries out)

I've read it 3 times took me 2 years to get past it the first time as I couldn't get into it, and kept giving up

[TheOneRinger]

You owe me a new keyboard fool (unless this mouthful of tea dries out)

I've read it 3 times took me 2 years to get past it the first time as I couldn't get into it, and kept giving up

I loved it, and I've read it several times as well.

[auximenes]

The next game of course is on a console, and all of them after that if Steefel's recent comments are to be believed. Turbine are now a console gaming company from here on in it seems, so PC technology changes won't really be their concern.

Hey, watch out, the sky is falling!

[speaksoftly]

Silmarillion Online. For $9.95 per month there's no graphics, they just scroll words across your screen until you lose interest.

There was Eru who in Arda was called Illuvitar, and ---

*snore*

[Maestro]

Silmarillion Online. For $9.95 per month there's no graphics, they just scroll words across your screen until you lose interest.

I couldn't stop laughing for about five minutes!! Awesomeness!!

[Khafar]

Yeah, I seem to recall AC1 used to do that with their patch notes. If you guys are doing that much work, and make the game look better, you deserve to have attention called to it.

There's certainly something to be said for hard-working developers getting public credit for the work they've done. However, that would sort of screw up finding out whether people even notice modest changes, and if they don't... it's hard to see how you justify doing more of that in a time-constrained/limited-resource environment.

Floon's dwarf idle stance wrt haurberks is a perfect example: it bugged floon, and they spend some non-trivial amount of time to fix it, but if no paying customers even noticed, that probably means the opportunity cost for that change was too high. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz.

Some changes are inherently like that -- perhaps a problem is found in the code where if just the right combination of timings and actions are seen, it could cause a server crash. Nobody will notice if that gets fixed, but it's very likely to be worth doing anyway due to the ugly potential of that defect. Art generally doesn't fall into that category, though...

From what Patience has said, I believe it's really up to the developers themselves just what makes it into the patch notes. If an artist wants to call attention to something modest which players might delight in if it's pointed out, they can include that with the notes sent to the CR team (or annotate it in the bug database if it was originally logged as a defect).

Khafar

[klyth]

The next game of course is on a console, and all of them after that if Steefel's recent comments are to be believed. Turbine are now a console gaming company from here on in it seems, so PC technology changes won't really be their concern.

edited. I'll sum up.

This whole thing makes me feel utterly defeated. I hate consoles.

[Arkarianor]

Improvements will undoubtedly happen, but seriously, not on the timescale that the forums operate on: no bi-annual replacement of the avatars and animations, or anything.

Well yes, of course, I'm just saying that you can't put these things off forever, they're inevitable and if you can get a headstart without sacrificing progress on things like new content, it'd be great...Hell, you're the professional, I'm probably just telling you things you already know...that must get old for you.

We just care about the game and are like a mother being overly intrusive/motherly about their kid going off to college (and I don't say that because I went to college this year, for game developing interestingly enough) but to reassure you that we only do it because we care about the game. But yeah, we do need to remember that you are the professional and not only do you handle these things better than us, you probably can't tell us half of what's going on in the decision making process.

[Yaaraer]

Improvements will undoubtedly happen, but seriously, not on the timescale that the forums operate on: no bi-annual replacement of the avatars and animations, or anything.

I would have to agree, small changes can be made, but to make drastic ones would practically require a new engine. I tend to think those type of advancements will be found in newer games. Lotro for example is already what, 4 or 5 years old if you count from inception to now. By game standards the technology is old. Even though we feel it's new and evolving. I'm fairly certain the look and feel of a game like the Hobbit will be vastly different to LOTRO.

[Caerylwyn]

edited. I'll sum up.

This whole thing makes me feel utterly defeated. I hate consoles.

Ummmmm... ok, maybe I missed the memo but...

What is a console?

I honestly don't know, this is not a derail.