Character Animations need to take a cue from Aion

[keithianw]

The graphics in this game with such a huge open world are top notch, especially with everything on high in DX10. Sometimes I catch myself just standing looking at the views or the atmospheric effects. I love this game, but what I don't understand is why they cannot improve the character animations. I think the graphics in the game are far superior to Aion and much in line with my taste, but they really should take a queue from Aion with regard to the animations. Does anyone know of another MMO that drastically improved the animations after it was released? Can it be done in an MMO? I hope it does here.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Does anyone know of another MMO that drastically improved the animations after it was released?

It is rare. These days a publisher spends 30+ million dollars and years of effort developing a game. It is not cost effective to scrap an expensive component like animations redo them from scratch. I suspect a lot things have to change to make it so. Game engine. All artwork has to be redone. Tooling has to be changed.

I've seen games where an expansion pack was released. The pack included an engine upgrade. The new landscape, animations and art work took advantage of the improved capabilities of the game and tooling.

Animations have another issue. They are tied into the combat and skill systems and the physic engine.

[seb187]

not that it was an engine redo.. but Everquest went from i want to say DX8 to 9... or 7 to 8 .. i dont remember which arround the time that planes of power came out..

and it cause HUGE issues... people were falling into the ground.. you couldnt get to places you could before... some places were very hard to reach after the change... and it left a sour taste in many peoples mouths ...

imo ... its just not a good idea to do .. to much time has already been spent to make things work right the way they do.

[Digital_Utopia]

As floon described it - the character rigs themselves have been around since practically the beginning. While engine changes are most certainly not necessary, redoing skeletons, animations, rigging, and updating meshes to "deform" correctly to the new skeletons would most certainly be a lot of work.

Think about it. There are a total of 7 unique skeletons (one for each sex, for each race) - meaning nearly every animation that can be done by any class would have to be redone. For each unique piece of armour/outfits in the game, there's 7 unique variations of it. Now think of how many different styles of clothing/armour are in this game and multiply that by 7. That's...more or less, how many individual meshes that have to be reassigned to new bones - if they increased the "resolution" (aka numbers of bones) in the character skeletons.

Not only that, but this increased resolution would require adjustments of the mesh itself in certain cases. Mainly to add more detail to the mesh to support the additional ways it could be deformed.


The reason I mention "new" skeletons, is that this is the main culprit. The animation quality is directly proportional to the amount of bones that can be animated. For instance, older skeletons (in older games) could have a grand total of two arm bones - one for the lower arm, and one for the upper arm. Well that's great and all, but the human body has two lower arm bones, one upper arm bone, a collar bone, and a shoulder blade. Naturally, as games have gotten more advanced, it's not surprising to find their skeletons also taking on an equivalent number of bones.

For reference, what follows is a basic explanation of how animations/meshes/bones work together:

character models in any game essentially work in a similar manner to how real people/animals work in biology. The only real difference between the two is that there's no muscle, no organs, and no physical skeleton. The model starts off as a mesh - a 3-D model created in the shape of a character. In order to get that character to do more than simply look nice, a structure of virtual bones must be added to that mesh. Like a real skeleton, these virtual bones are the objects that get animated. Unlike a real skeleton, or a real person - the mesh doesn't automatically deform to these bones. In fact, all the animation in the world isn't going to amount to much without telling the mesh how it's supposed to react to those bones.

This process is known as "weighing" - essentially each point of a mesh is told how much each bone of the skeleton influences it. For instance, a point of the mesh on the "shin" might be completely influenced by just the shin bone, while a point at the back of the knee would be influenced by both the lower and upper leg bones. The more bones that are added to this skeleton, the more bones can influence any one point - especially when you get into complex areas such as the forearm, shoulder, and pelvic regions. When you start talking about various pieces of clothing or armour - then things get even more interesting, as clothing (especially rigid armour) doesn't twist and bend to the same degree that the body does.

Unlike Motion Capture - there's no automatic way to weigh a mesh to bones, nor is there much automation involved in optimizing the mesh, while keeping enough detail where it is needed. While those who do this stuff for a living can do so much more quickly (with better quality) than a novice such as myself, there would still be an impressive amount of work required to update everything.

Don't get me wrong - I would be willing to even buy an expansion (let alone a free content update) if the only feature was a animation revamp - that, along with the UI are the two biggest things (in my opinion) that detract from an otherwise beautiful game. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that the majority feels the way I do when it comes to the content in an expansion or book update. Perhaps it would be an interesting survey question...

[Boraxxe]

The graphics in this game with such a huge open world are top notch, especially with everything on high in DX10. Sometimes I catch myself just standing looking at the views or the atmospheric effects. I love this game, but what I don't understand is why they cannot improve the character animations. I think the graphics in the game are far superior to Aion and much in line with my taste, but they really should take a queue from Aion with regard to the animations. Does anyone know of another MMO that drastically improved the animations after it was released? Can it be done in an MMO? I hope it does here.

As some Dev put it (probably Floon) every game-developer has to decide on what to focus on. They use the technology thats available and pick/choose where to put their effort. Looks like Aion decided to spend some extra effort/money on animations. Turbine chose (with Lotro) to focus on the "world".
I am happy with the choice they made.

It could be that the tech they had available at the time they started was not at the same level that it was when Aion started.

And as stated above, revamping is such a major "re-do" that we would all end up screaming at them if they went down that road.

[forlorn_hope]

One MMO did an entire graphics engine upgrade/replacement, I think it was DAoC?

[Lara69690]

One MMO did an entire graphics engine upgrade/replacement, I think it was DAoC?

Yup, sure was and they did a phenomenal job too. It was an amazing transformation of the lands and the characters and animations, albeit rather unsettling til we all became accustomed to it.

[sir-rinthian]

I hate to use Runescape as an example, but here I must... Jagex has been redoing all the graphics and animations of their entire game. This has taken a couple years. Now, granted, they dont have the same work force as Turbine, but still. Now, look at how simple Runescape is. The graphics could probably be drawn by any 8 year old. The animations are simple. Whack the mob on the head, stab it in the gut, block its attack.

If it took a couple years to redo that simple stuff, imagine the extreme amount of work it would take to update our incredible world! Honestly, this would be fun, but dreaming about it is the best we're gonna get.

[floon]

I hate to use Runescape as an example, but here I must... Jagex has been redoing all the graphics and animations of their entire game. This has taken a couple years. Now, granted, they dont have the same work force as Turbine, but still. Now, look at how simple Runescape is. The graphics could probably be drawn by any 8 year old. The animations are simple. Whack the mob on the head, stab it in the gut, block its attack.

If it took a couple years to redo that simple stuff, imagine the extreme amount of work it would take to update our incredible world! Honestly, this would be fun, but dreaming about it is the best we're gonna get.

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...

[BrotherGab]

Floon, will you 1v1 my spider?

Or change my avatar to

[Giolon]

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...

Maybe it would help if you guys called out some of that stuff in the patch notes? Or maybe people would still just complain "OMG WHY ARE THEY WASTING TIME ON THIS WORTHLESS STUFF"...
I don't think you can win, Floon.

[Digital_Utopia]

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'm not sure I've noticed many improvements - although the female elf hunter bow "pull out" animation seems to be a lot better than it was. Yet, that could've also been a sync issue as well, or an artifact from the "floating swords" bug. It's tough to tell for sure, but regardless I'm glad that my hunter's bow doesn't fly out of her hands, spin around, and come back to her hands every time she goes to kill something.

One thing I did recently notice (in the process of taking screen shots) is this:



Like I said, probably nothing I'd have noticed while playing - if I wasn't trying to take a screenshot of my Warden in combat. Just thought you might like to know.

[Giolon]

I'm not sure I've noticed many improvements - although the female elf hunter bow "pull out" animation seems to be a lot better than it was. Yet, that could've also been a sync issue as well, or an artifact from the "floating swords" bug. It's tough to tell for sure, but regardless I'm glad that my hunter's bow doesn't fly out of her hands, spin around, and come back to her hands every time she goes to kill something.

Mine still does it half the time. I long for the time when that didn't happen (I'm pretty sure it started around the MoM release when horse animations got all wonked up), but I can also easily see why it's not a high priority fix. I just pretend that my character is extremely dextrous and doing a flourish when that happens. ~

[john_anthony]

post

you know i always appreciate your elucidating of the difficult process for people who insist things are sooooo easy to fix.

however, your post does bring up another interesting point: how priorities are set. the dwarf-hauberk thing is an example. so would things like changing the way hats/helms look (including overadjusting some to sitting waaaay to low on the forehead) and changes to way LM staves sit on the back (a new look which 90% of LMs still loathe).

some of those are not only controversial changes (which some people don't consider improvements, since, in their eyes they made things look worse), but they also beg the question of why those things were prioritized over other graphics needs. were dwarf hauberks and hats and LM staves really the highest priority stuff? if so, why them and not others?

[LoupGarou216]

I love the animations in Aion, I really do. They are absolutely stunning, fast-paced and engaging.


But I wouldn't want them in LOTRO.


Why not?


Because in Aion you play a demi-god. You're basically the equivalent of a Maiar. So that's why the animations are insane and you can pull off crazy moves and attacks. If the mere mortals of Middle-earth could pull that stuff off in-game it would be completely Rtarded.

LOTRO's animations need work, but going up to Aion's level would be overboard.

[Merciful_Death]

Honestly, I am not all that impressed by much about Aion.

The running is like running in chest-deep water.

The change between flying and gliding is jarring and abrupt.

The zones are tiny, which may by why the running is so slow?

Aion is good at being Aion, but it is not in any way a game that I want to play. And that's leaving aside the entirety of PvP, which is not my cup of arsenic.

[Kuranese]

Floon, will you 1v1 my spider?

Or change my avatar to

Not to go off topic, but why can't weapon effects look more like this? Even if only in combat. Out of combat it would just be annoying, and for those that don't like it at all, give em a toggle.

[delphinius81]

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.

Just a hypothetical, general MMO game design question here. At what point during the MMO architecture lifecycle do developers decide that the current architecture isn't going to scale up in the ways they want it to, so major architecture changes are needed. If you look at your example, something like adjusting the way an outfit fits on a character during one animation resulted in lots of other animations needing to be adjusted. 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. Obviously there are trade-offs to be made, so some desired changes might never see light of day on a live architecture. You guys may take your lessons learned and pour that into your new MMO architecture.

But back to my question, is there a point in time where you (in the general developer sense, not *you* in particular) say, we really need to spend the time to extend or change the architecture, because it is limiting our ability to scale up. It will be a lot of up front work, but it needs to be done for the health and flexibility of the game going forward. 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?

[floon]

Are architecture changes expected milestones built into the lifecycle of MMOs?

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.

[arinthros]

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.

Query: Can you guys throw some of that in the release notes, or maybe a dev diary?

In my case, it's not for lack of wanting to notice, it's a lack of knowing what to be looking for. If yall were able to inform us of some of the things you change like that each time, I know a bunch of us would go look for them right away, and actually appreciate the work that you do.

[thEdge7777]

The graphics in this game with such a huge open world are top notch, especially with everything on high in DX10. Sometimes I catch myself just standing looking at the views or the atmospheric effects. I love this game, but what I don't understand is why they cannot improve the character animations. I think the graphics in the game are far superior to Aion and much in line with my taste, but they really should take a queue from Aion with regard to the animations. Does anyone know of another MMO that drastically improved the animations after it was released? Can it be done in an MMO? I hope it does here.

It is a very good point and question. Over time you forget about it, but when you play Aion for a bit and then come back to LOTRO the animations look goofy to some degree. I also agree LOTRO overall graphic quality and art style (real/rustic/old english) remains to be beat. Sure games like Aion are pretty (AoC is as well), but when you sum up the parts I still feel LOTRO is better. If they would fix the animations somehow LOTRO graphics would only have one last major critique, the pop in effect.

I have had friends/family who couldn't play LOTRO for more than a week because of the animations and popin issues. That is sad I know, and never making it to the Great Barrows or through a few epic story lines should be a crime when evaluating this game, but in the modern mmo world today we start evaluating at face value. Otherwise we would all still be playing AC.

"Wow, if these animations are this bad how good could the rest of the game be." Which in LOTRO's case has no connection. The point is the animations could use a major redo. I think if the devs could spend 3-6 months reworking and show the world before and after videos along with a long list of changes they could increase their user base for the long journey ahead.

[klyth]

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.

[Stormwaltz]

Query: Can you guys throw some of that in the release notes, or maybe a dev diary?

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.

Odds are people won't notice the subtle stuff. I remember spending two days with an actual artist making a "fall leaves kicked up by wind" special effect for an autumn event. For all our work, no one ever mentioned seeing it.

[Shadowfyre]

The only thing I LOVE about Aion is the character creation. I truly wish this game had such indepth character creations. I've seen many cookie cutter me's running around and feel that this is one of the very few aspects that this game is seriously lacking.

[Digital_Utopia]

I love the animations in Aion, I really do. They are absolutely stunning, fast-paced and engaging.


But I wouldn't want them in LOTRO.


Why not?


Because in Aion you play a demi-god. You're basically the equivalent of a Maiar. So that's why the animations are insane and you can pull off crazy moves and attacks. If the mere mortals of Middle-earth could pull that stuff off in-game it would be completely Rtarded.

LOTRO's animations need work, but going up to Aion's level would be overboard.

They're not talking necessarily about the "flare" of the animations, but the quality of them. Nobody here is asking for the ability to jump up, do a mid-air pirouette and flip before vaporizing the enemy. They just want the animations that are currently in the game to not look quite as "rough".