35 replies to this topic

[DaZur]

I'm sorry... While opinions differ and that's a discussion elsewhere. IMHO I find MWO to be a beautiful crafted graphical game. That said, no matter how well crafted the mechs are, how wonderful artistic the art is... It feels lifeless, almost soulless.

Why? inverse kinematics... Or more accurately the absence there of.

IMHO so much immersion, so much "life" if a mech can exude it, is lost when time and time again we see a mech plodding along and there is no acknowledgement of it's topology and it's legs and feet do not coordinate with the terrain...

We had it. It was beautiful. But we lost it to some technological glitch they could not wrap teir arms around to properly address...

While PGI is in the mode of righting wrongs... It's high time they acknowledged the the absence of inverse kinematics makes their game look second rate in contrast to so many other games not even mentioning the reality that all the older mech titles handled it with no problems...

It's a trivial thing I know... That said, knowing what it used to look like in contrast to what we have now makes me die a little each time I see it.

[Kilo 40]

I'm pretty sure they fairly recently acknowledged the the absence of inverse kinematics, and gave a reason for why it's not in the game at the moment, but I'll be damned if I can remember where the post was, or why they said it's not in the game.

but yeah, I'd like to see it too.

[cSand]

AMEN

[Alistair Winter]

[RunWithRandoms]

Hey there, I don't know the term "Inverse Kinematics". Can you elaborate, and how does it change immersion.

I'd love to see a mode that detected dual stick use, and was only playable if the player was willing to rig them up. For non competitive immersions sake.

I don't imagine it will ever happen, but it's fun to shoot with a stick, even if it's also horrible.

[William Mountbank]

Envisage, on 01 December 2015 - 11:53 PM, said:

Hey there, I don't know the term "Inverse Kinematics". Can you elaborate, and how does it change immersion.

The mech's feet dynamically match the contours of the ground. Currently the mech always 'runs on the spot' no matter how the topology of the ground changes. A better looking but more computationally intensive method is to calculate the position of the animation skeleton in real time and match that to the ground, like rag doll animations used for when mechs die, but instead for when they walk.
It looked great in Soul Reaver in '97.

[RunWithRandoms]

does it change anything that I see through my cockpit?

[xengk]

I think it was mentioned in one of the town hall that they are aware of it but it is low priority on the To Fix List.

Lack of Inverse Kinematics leads to Floating Leg Syndrome.
Here is a visual of MWO Inverse Kinematics for those that are unfamiliar.
With IK


Without IK

Edited by xengk, 02 December 2015 - 08:09 AM.

[Moonlight Grimoire]

I remember this being brought up in a town hall. Apparently, live convergence, it caused server crashes due to computer arcane science. (I consider all programming witchcraft after having done it for a few years, as does my brother who has a BS in CS.)

I believe they did say it was something they wanted to go back to and put back into the game, as well as proper collisions (hello death from above on that table, er dire wolf). As it is they are trying to make the game play solid first.

There are a lot of things still on the back burner of features promised or removed that they want to return to the game. Given the progress I have seen since when I joined in January, eh, they can do it, just going to take a while.

[LordNothing]

forward kinematics is the process of resolving the endpoint of a system of joints and bones from the angles of the joints. ik is the reverse of it, to determine the joint angles to reach the desired endpoint. that means if you place the mechs foot steps, the mech will respond with realistic animation. you could also use the system for melee attacks by punching in the direction of the crosshair, and the arm will animate the punch right.

other side of it those things are hard to get to look right and would be very labor intensive to implement for every mech. each one would need to have their bone system tweaked and honed to perfection.

Edited by LordNothing, 02 December 2015 - 12:26 AM.

[RunWithRandoms]

Maybe the steam release will give them the money to put it back in?

Sorry, that was actually a troll

[Sjorpha]

Envisage, on 02 December 2015 - 12:03 AM, said:

does it change anything that I see through my cockpit?

It makes all mechs you see through your cockpit look a lot better since their legs and feet will dynamically adapt to terrain, so yes it changes what you see quite a lot.

Envisage, on 02 December 2015 - 12:26 AM, said:

Maybe the steam release will give them the money to put it back in?

Sorry, that was actually a troll

You have a point though, it's a technical/server/hitreg issue and money helps being able to put man hours into solving it. So yes, successful steam release would help with that just like with any part of development.

[Sjorpha]

LordNothing, on 02 December 2015 - 12:24 AM, said:

other side of it those things are hard to get to look right and would be very labor intensive to implement for every mech. each one would need to have their bone system tweaked and honed to perfection.

According to PGI, all mechs are already rigged for inverse kinematics. In theory it could be switched on today and look good.

The problem apparently has to do with other things like performance hits and hitreg issues caused by IK necessarily being client side and therefore ping desyncing may cause the legs to look different on client and server, maybe it's difficult or bandwidth expensive to make HSR account for rewinding of IK states? I don't know but I'm guessing it's along those lines.

The result from a player standpoint should be bad hitreg or shots passing through on legs when shooting a mech standing on uneven terrain, I can understand the hesitation to flip it on given all the complaints about hitreg.

But as stated, it's not about looks and IK is technically/graphically already in the game and all mechs are set up for it, as evidenced by the fact that it was enabled before. PGI has also stated that all new mechs are set up for IK as well, in preparation for when they turn it back on.

Why not turn on IK for the next PTS session just to see how bad the issues are?

Edited by Sjorpha, 02 December 2015 - 12:43 AM.

[EgoSlayer]

Sjorpha, on 02 December 2015 - 12:39 AM, said:

According to PGI, all mechs are already rigged for inverse kinematics. In theory it could be switched on today and look good.

The problem apparently has to do with other things like performance hits and hitreg issues caused by IK necessarily being client side and therefore ping desyncing may cause the legs to look different on client and server, maybe it's difficult or bandwidth expensive to make HSR account for rewinding of IK states? I don't know but I'm guessing it's along those lines.

The result from a player standpoint should be bad hitreg or shots passing through on legs when shooting a mech standing on uneven terrain, I can understand the hesitation to flip it on given all the complaints about hitreg.

But as stated, it's not about looks and IK is technically/graphically already in the game and all mechs are set up for it, as evidenced by the fact that it was enabled before. PGI has also stated that all new mechs are set up for IK as well, in preparation for when they turn it back on.

Why not turn on IK for the next PTS session just to see how bad the issues are?

You have it backwards, the IK is all done on the server side because it's a server authoritative game and it's the server that is determining the mechs skeletal positions, not the clients. In 8v8 the server was (barely) able to support the IK calculations for 16 mechs but it still caused issues with rubber banding and hit registration. With 24 mechs it's too much work for the server to do this in addition to the other match overhead like HSR.

Considering hit-reg is still a server load issue I'd rather have working hit-reg than IK. Fix hit-reg, then we can talk about IK.

Edited by EgoSlayer, 02 December 2015 - 03:19 AM.

[DaZur]

EgoSlayer, on 02 December 2015 - 03:18 AM, said:

You have it backwards, the IK is all done on the server side because it's a server authoritative game and it's the server that is determining the mechs skeletal positions, not the clients. In 8v8 the server was (barely) able to support the IK calculations for 16 mechs but it still caused issues with rubber banding and hit registration. With 24 mechs it's too much work for the server to do this in addition to the other match overhead like HSR.

Considering hit-reg is still a server load issue I'd rather have working hit-reg than IK. Fix hit-reg, then we can talk about IK.

Not to disagree as clearly hitreg is important to a shooter... But I'm not entirely convinced it's purely a sever tic issue. It may be an aspect but surely not a principle reason.

If that truly is the case then drop it back to 16. You don't sacrifice quality / fidelity in favor of quantity....

16 cantina tacos are worth much more than 24 Taco Bell.

[Mystere]

What's so difficult about plopping in a few nVidia GPUs on the servers and make CryENGINE use CUDA?

Edited by Mystere, 02 December 2015 - 12:51 PM.

[Coolant]

I have no idea what Inverse Kinematics is...

[cSand]

Mystere, on 02 December 2015 - 12:36 PM, said:

What's so difficult about plopping in a few nVidia GPUs on the servers and make CryENGINE use CUDA?

[Mystere]

cSand, on 02 December 2015 - 01:05 PM, said:

Sometimes, a picture is definitely not worth a thousand words.

And besides, I think you missed my point.

Edited by Mystere, 02 December 2015 - 01:09 PM.

[DAYLEET]

Wasnt it also because, what one see on his screen isnt always the same as the others screen? Like you could think your lower torso is hidden but i see on your your leg stick out because on my side the bent knee is not the same?