49 replies to this topic

[Funky Bacon]

I know this game at one point had some level of dynamic leg movement that adjusted to terrain but was removed due to network strain or something...

But why does the leg movement have to be such an immersion killer in this game?
The animations are stiff and have no interaction with terrain or speed, not even a broken leg affects it. It's just... horrible to look at. Some mechs have decent animations but others are just terrible, like the wobbly Stalker or the prancing Dire Wolf.

Another big thing is how it makes legs clip through terrain and walking on slopes and bumps makes this really apparent with one foot in the air and the other going through terrain. Mechs are just a walking box of stiff animations and in a game like this that is really not acceptable. If this was a top-down strategy game that would be okay, but in a game like this it really kills the immersion for me and makes it look really ugly.

Say what you will about MW4 but that game got this part down right and it looks awesome. Their legs re-angle, hips twist and adjust to keep the mech balanced with every step it takes, the feet rotate as they turn and toes "hang" when lifting their feet. The walking animation even changes depending on speed. When you see a Daishi (Dire Wolf) come walking down the streets it looks big, heavy and mighty. It's downright intimidating. MWO's Dire Wolf is just like... "whut?".

-------------

MWO had this once. Although I think this only happen when a mech stood still. But still, it was something.
Just look at how much better this look than a mech with one foot floating and the other clipping through the terrain.

Spoiler

MW4 examples.

Spoiler

TLDR: I really wish the game had better leg animation and was more dynamic and interactive with terrain instead of looped animations that do nothing to add immersion.

[Nazar24]

I totally agree.
I wasn't playing when this feature was in game and I hope that in the future it could be reimplemented.

Maybe it screwed too much with the hitboxes?

Come on PGI, unnerf the leg movement!

[TimePeriod]

That would require effort from PGI.
Effort which they allocated to Mech manufacture.
To make more money.

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

[monk]

So many little things like this have disappeared. One can only hope at some point they bother to put everything back in that made the game feel more polished (yes, there need to be adjustments and fixes...but the point remains - things feel like they are missing).

[Darklord]

You think the legs are bad watch some of the mech arm and shoulder joints.

[Zervziel]

So many things have gone missing as monk mentioned. We used to have better damage decals that mirrored the damage done like burn marks for lasers. Now we have generic pockmarks that look ugly as sin.

Graphics were actually better earlier on as well. Then PGI regressed that too because it was easier than actually trying to fix the problem.

Also now I want to play Mech Warrior 4's campaign again and I can't because Mektek sold out.

[Destructicus]

I really wish the mechs moved like mechs and not "skate" across the terrain
I wish lightmech's legs moved like mechwarrior 4, fast and nimble, not the prancing striders we have.

[Alistair Winter]

Just another case of MWO lostech.

I can't really think of similar games that keep losing features as time goes on. I mean, sometimes games intentionally remove features that they don't like. In this game, old stuff just breaks and gets taken away. Or sometimes they give up alltogether.

Destructicus, on 22 August 2014 - 03:11 PM, said:

I really wish the mechs moved like mechs and not "skate" across the terrain
I wish lightmech's legs moved like mechwarrior 4, fast and nimble, not the prancing striders we have.

ref: Commando.

Hands down, worst running animation in the game. Looks like a wooden puppet, pulled along by invisible strings.

[ToxinTractor]

better animations for legs would be the best thing ever.

[Kiiyor]

Inverse kinematics? I recall it was removed for performance reasons.

It sounds like the sort of thing that would be added back in after the backend is improved. Maybe in the future.

[Cayp]

Totally agree with topic.

Even in MW3, that was released in 1999, 15 years ago, that was working on Pentium 166MHz through dial-up internet connection this kind of mech animation wasn't an issue.

Now we have 10-100-1000MBit internet, 3GHz multi-core processors, gigabytes of RAM and cannot afford it?

This is just ridiculous.

First thing that comes to mind that nobody really cares because this won't bring any money profit. Second thought is that major part of players is treated as hamsters that will eat anything with "MechWarrior" label on it just because there is no other choice.

I understand that working on MechWarrior is not simple as it seems and earning money on it too.
But everyone who played in MW3 liked its realistic feel of mech that you were piloting. Now we have puppets.
And I'm now paying not for cool gameplay, but for one of the last battletech franchise.

[Elizander]

I'm all for this one.

[William Mountbank]

Dynamic in game Inverse Kinematics isn't that hard, it always looked beautiful in the Soul Reaver games back in the 90s.

In MWO all the mech meshes will have IK skeletons anyway, because it makes animation easy and more lifelike than keyframing the bare vertices. If you have a physics model that can take the IK skeleton, and use it to adjust the angles for some of the joints, then you can have realistic gait simulation in real time. I guess the problem is that with a server authoritative game, it's the server that is doing all the skeletal animation work, and dynamic IK is probably a resource hog or lag generator - particularly if the game engine isn't optimised for what you're trying to animate and serve to the clients.

TLDR: We won't get back legs that conform to terrain. Not soon, not ever.

[stjobe]

William Mountbank, on 14 September 2014 - 05:46 AM, said:

Dynamic in game Inverse Kinematics isn't that hard, it always looked beautiful in the Soul Reaver games back in the 90s.

In MWO all the mech meshes will have IK skeletons anyway, because it makes animation easy and more lifelike than keyframing the bare vertices. If you have a physics model that can take the IK skeleton, and use it to adjust the angles for some of the joints, then you can have realistic gait simulation in real time. I guess the problem is that with a server authoritative game, it's the server that is doing all the skeletal animation work, and dynamic IK is probably a resource hog or lag generator - particularly if the game engine isn't optimised for what you're trying to animate and serve to the clients.

TLDR: We won't get back legs that conform to terrain. Not soon, not ever.

Yep. We had inverse kinematics, and it was taken out for performance reasons when they re-wrote the netcode to be server authoritative instead of client-authoritative.

It's lostech now.

[Elizander]

stjobe, on 14 September 2014 - 05:57 AM, said:

Yep. We had inverse kinematics, and it was taken out for performance reasons when they re-wrote the netcode to be server authoritative instead of client-authoritative.

It's lostech now.

Oh, that's simple then. They just have to put it back.

[stjobe]

Elizander, on 14 September 2014 - 07:23 AM, said:

Oh, that's simple then. They just have to put it back.

No, no, no, that's not how lostech works.

First, they must find a band of unknown MechWarriors and send them off to have outrageously fantastic adventures on a back-world planet, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds by strength of character and clever use of what little equipment they have.

Then, these heroes must discover a long-lost Star League memory core, but instead of using it themselves, give it for all the Inner Sphere to enjoy.

Then, and only then, can PGI start implementing the lost technology of Inverse Kinematics in a way that doesn't reduce performance in a server-side authoritative game

[Cayp]

What "performance reasons" are you talking about?

Mechs are not human bodies - it's not so hard to calculate skeleton animation on server side with IK.

You may think that this calculations consumes a lot of resources - but it is not!

Physical model of mech barely consists of 20 joints and same amount of parts that represent it's body. Detailed shape of parts is not important, only inertia tensor (9 floating point values which is calculated beforehand) and linear size (box) matters.

Think about it: 15 year old computers was able to calculate all of it realtime for 20 mechs.
And NOW we can not afford it?!
In our time when servers can have dozen of 20 core processors with hyperthreading and dozen of Nvidia Tesla GPUs?!
For these purposes there is no need to fully render level, no textures, no lighting, no shaping of polygons, there is no need in full amount of polygons even.

I'm not eating these "performance reasons".

[stjobe]

Cayp, on 14 September 2014 - 08:27 AM, said:

I'm not eating these "performance reasons".

And in the end your personal incredulity matters little, as that is the reason given by the devs.

[Cayp]

stjobe, on 14 September 2014 - 09:11 AM, said:

And in the end your personal incredulity matters little, as that is the reason given by the devs.

I'm an IT specialist that working in IT company and have a degree in physics. I'm really aware about performance issues that could happen. I'm really know what is IK and skeleton animation and it's costs.

And when I'm reading "that is the reason given by the devs." - that translates for me into "It's rocket science. Nobody knows why, but we believe in all what dev says like that was a Pope of Rome".

The point is that when dev says "performance issues" everybody just stopping whining because nobody understands a thing in this "rocket science" magick. Everyone just forget about this forever.

Yeah? Really?!

And thats exactly what dev wanted when said that. - Problem solved. Hamsters continue to eat their only MechWarrior.

So, in the end, if you don't have anything to say about "performance issues" - could you please don't touch my "personal incredulity" if you don't have one.

I'm really believe that these "performance issues" can be solved.
And I think - they should be solved in Mech Simulator Game!

Edited by Cayp, 14 September 2014 - 10:28 AM.

[stjobe]

Cayp, on 14 September 2014 - 10:27 AM, said:

I'm an IT specialist that working in IT company and have a degree in physics. I'm really aware about performance issues that could happen. I'm really know what is IK and skeleton animation and it's costs.

And when I'm reading "that is the reason given by the devs." - that translates for me into "It's rocket science. Nobody knows why, but we believe in all what dev says like that was a Pope of Rome".

Well, *** for tat. I write, test, debug, and optimize server code for a living. In other words, I'm a professional software developer. I know that something that doesn't look like it'll affect much can do so if it's called often enough, or from enough places.

So when the devs for this game say "it was removed in a performance pass", that's what I believe - not because it's "rocket science" (I do performance passes regularly on my own and my team's code) or for some reason that I don't understand what they say (I'm quite familiar with software development). It's because they have no reason to lie about that.

I believe they did remove it because the servers didn't perform as well as they wanted after they went from client-side authoritative to server-side authoritative. This wasn't necessarily because the IK calculations were the main culprit in the bad performance, it may well have been just because those were easier to remove than other systems, and affected the rest of the game the least.

But in the end they have no reason to lie about it, and your incredulity is still irrelevant.