26 replies to this topic

[Adrian Pride]

Ther are a Bunch of NPC Animations in the Game, PGI did not use
Maybe Animations where only for MechCon Trailers...bring some life back to the Mech Hangar PGI !

[Nesutizale]

Last night I just had a dialog with Fahad where he said the other people in the dropship are pretty useless. I emiditalty thought "is this and 4th wall joke about the other characters in the hangar just standing their?"

I mean when you are loading a mission you can see characters moveing from one mech to the next. Would have been nice ot have that ingame too.

[The Amazing Atomic Spaniel]

In my game it's taken me many years to get to level 12, but he and Northern Lady haven't aged a day. I wonder if the dropship has a room with a couple of aging portraits in it somewhere...

[Adrian Pride]

The Amazing Atomic Spaniel, on 03 January 2020 - 07:28 AM, said:

In my game it's taken me many years to get to level 12, but he and Northern Lady haven't aged a day. I wonder if the dropship has a room with a couple of aging portraits in it somewhere...

No sorry, only a hidden Toilet behind the Door in your Office

[Koniving]

Nesutizale, on 03 January 2020 - 06:29 AM, said:

Last night I just had a dialog with Fahad where he said the other people in the dropship are pretty useless. I emiditalty thought "is this and 4th wall joke about the other characters in the hangar just standing their?"

I mean when you are loading a mission you can see characters moveing from one mech to the next. Would have been nice ot have that ingame too.

Another fun one is "They're killing us, we have women and children here", the buildings are empty and immediately after the enemies are gone and the bar disappears, no one cares that I levelled the place.
During instant action, enemy pilot referring to me, "We have to stop him now, he's killing civilians!"
There's nobody there.

Game files have scripts for people running away while on fire. Scripts for cowering and hiding.
Pretty clear there was stuff that didn't make it into the final game.
There's about half a dozen technician animations...including pull-ups.

[Sabertooth1966]

Koniving, on 03 January 2020 - 10:47 AM, said:

Another fun one is "They're killing us, we have women and children here", the buildings are empty and immediately after the enemies are gone and the bar disappears, no one cares that I levelled the place.
During instant action, enemy pilot referring to me, "We have to stop him now, he's killing civilians!"
There's nobody there.

Game files have scripts for people running away while on fire. Scripts for cowering and hiding.
Pretty clear there was stuff that didn't make it into the final game.
There's about half a dozen technician animations...including pull-ups.

I know you or someone had said in another thread that a dev had said these were left out do to increasing system demands, but the game has also not had it's rating assigned yet. Things like people running away on fire and such would probably hurt any pending rating. I know World Of Warships had crew animations they used in the ports and when asked why not on the ships in combat they said they could do some but then they would get a harsher game rating. I believe it would of been do to EU guidelines but I can't remember for certain. They were referring to things like people on fire and getting blown into the water and such.

[The Amazing Atomic Spaniel]

I want a stompy robot fantasy. The day the game includes people running and on fire is the day I stop playing it. Ugh.

[Koniving]

Someone did claim to talk with the devs with it being something they wanted to do, but the issue was to render the number of people (at the polygons the characters have) necessary to make anything convincing would be pretty insane [even in the "alpha" footage and such, hardly more than 6 people were rendered at once, this is because the people they made have more polygons than the mechs and tanks], in addition to the number of individual AIs performing tasks compared to what the game normally handles, it's a performance nightmare.

Spoiler

Poster name left out to avoid sending a notification to him, but click on the arrow to jump to the original post.

From 13 December 2019 - 07:12 PM:

I've already been talking to a PGI dev about this, they are not implemented for performance reasons and the dev in question is still pushing internally for an implementation, temper your expectations while replying to yourself schizophrenically, this a forum not a blog.

And much later while discussing performance saving and implementing infantry.

Koniving, on 14 December 2019 - 12:32 PM, said:

MW5's mainly PVE, so the benefits [of converting LRMs from LRM-20 to 3 projectiles doing lots more damage and other similar weirdness to gain performance] are pretty much non-existent unless you're playing with friends. And it's not the multiplayer performance issue that comes up, it's the single player.

The bigger issue is the AI than the polygons. It's significantly less effort to simply use a 100-300 polygon mesh and animate it. (Current human models are 2,000 to 5,000 polygons, average mech is around 17,000, but to have any sort of realistic number of humans fleeing buildings you'd need 20+ which could be up to 100,000 polygons and that adds up with the environment and everything else.)
Each vehicle combat AI in MW5 right now uses a minimum of 7 trees.
Mechs use 39 trees. (Edit: Ally mechs use 39 trees. Enemy mechs use 24.)

Humans currently have 12 trees related to movement and the like, 11 of which are tenable to combat though several are worker-related in combat conditions. if they can set up support weapons then you have about 3 more. If they can swarm the player or try to climb inside, then you have perhaps 4 or 5 more..
Then you add this by the individual level and put 50 people on the screen running these trees.
You now have 950 individual trees floating around bouncing between black boards, checking on circumstances, finding locations to go to, targets to acquire, barks to be called... That's just the infantry.

Currently, I've never seen more than 6 enemy mechs on the screen at once, that's 144 individual trees. Combine with some 16-odd vehicles for an additional 112 for a total of 256 behavior trees. Then you add in your 3 teammates whom actually have 117 and now you have 373 trees.

Now granted, Unreal trees are event-driven so they only check when events occur, but these trees are open for each AI, waiting for events to occur, jumping between blackboard references and tree calls to decide what tree should be active and when for every individual soldier.

It's said online that Unreal 4 begins to bog down when there is about 400-500 behavior trees on the field at the same time.
On maps as large as MW5's that is probably reduced even further compared to normal first-person shooter maps.

With the fake individual setup I described (that is one unit appears to be 5 or more soldiers moving and working together as a squad), we could have 50 soldiers on the screen with only 95 trees on the field.
With the RTS style setup, we could have 50 real individuals (each unit is one "human" character) on the field, with at most 150 individual trees, and I'm thinking no more than 50 command trees as a max for the most insanely complex command AI imaginable. So 200 trees tops (but likely significantly less, like in the 174 range).

Combine the fake individual soldiers (squad units) with the predicted trees and you have 468 trees.
Combine the RTS style two-tier AI and you have 547 to 573 trees.

Significantly more tenable, but dangerously in the bogged down performance range regardless. There's a reason why you almost never see 50+ enemies on the screen at once in any game with any kind of complicated ai.

[Appogee]

Koniving, on 03 January 2020 - 06:39 PM, said:

Someone did claim to talk with the devs with it being something they wanted to do, but the issue was to render the number of people (at the polygons the characters have) necessary to make anything convincing would be pretty insane [even in the "alpha" footage and such, hardly more than 6 people were rendered at once, this is because the people they made have more polygons than the mechs and tanks], in addition to the number of individual AIs performing tasks compared to what the game normally handles, it's a performance nightmare.

There's nothing else going on in the Mech Bay. There's no performance reason that there couldn't have been some NPCs moving around in there.

So I think it's just PGI's usual 'minimally viable' approach to product development.

[Koniving]

Appogee, on 04 January 2020 - 12:49 AM, said:

There's nothing else going on in the Mech Bay. There's no performance reason that there couldn't have been some NPCs moving around in there.

So I think it's just PGI's usual 'minimally viable' approach to product development.

I was talking about the fact that PGI has many references to civilians and human soldiers on the ground...fighting mechs..
Animations for soldiers using rocket launchers and autorifles.
Animations for people set on fire with FLAMERS... (Edit: Scripts for them set on fire and cowering, not animations)
Animations for people...crouching, jumping, shooting, reloading, running, walking...
Animations for people fixing tanks in the field...

And all the issues as to why they are in the game files...but not in the game.

The reason they're not in the dropship is pretty simple, a combination of laziness and "lack of time."

Edited by Koniving, 04 January 2020 - 03:35 AM.

[Koniving]

Meanwhile, two brothers and some spare time between their jobs and life.

[Appogee]

Koniving, on 04 January 2020 - 03:29 AM, said:

I was talking about the fact that PGI has many references to civilians and human soldiers on the ground...fighting mechs..
Animations for soldiers using rocket launchers and autorifles.
Animations for people set on fire with FLAMERS... (Edit: Scripts for them set on fire and cowering, not animations)
Animations for people...crouching, jumping, shooting, reloading, running, walking...
Animations for people fixing tanks in the field...

And all the issues as to why they are in the game files...but not in the game.

The reason they're not in the dropship is pretty simple, a combination of laziness and "lack of time."

Understood. I was just adding that there's no performance reason why they couldn't have had animated NPCs in the Mech Lab.

As you say, it smacks of them (again) not finishing their product before selling it.

[Adrian Pride]

Appogee, on 04 January 2020 - 07:26 AM, said:

Understood. I was just adding that there's no performance reason why they couldn't have had animated NPCs in the Mech Lab.

As you say, it smacks of them (again) not finishing their product before selling it.

The Animations are InGame, for Fahad and other NPC's.



PGI created them, it seems, to only show in the MechCon Trailers to hype the People.
In most all Trailer you see walking or acting People in the Mechbay,

By digging deeper in the Gamefiles you find Files like: Mechanics_Walking_Base.uasset
Inside you find the reason why it is not in the Game:
Game/Developers/rodcaballero/Cinematics/Maps/IntroTutorial_Level_ROD
Those Folder do not exist in the Game...

Those "Level" are created for the Trailer...not for the Game.
You can check Rod Caballero's LinkedIn Profile here
Some Office Worker, went to Freelance Animations and now resident PGI Head of Adwerd Trailer Creator.
No Offence to him...

What PGI rescued is the fact they release the Game on Epic and not on Steam.
If this Game would be on Steam, a massive Shitstorm breaks out.
From People belive to buy a Game that looks like in the Trailers.
You all know what happend to MassEffect Andromeda..first storm started only because of some Eyes People dont like.
What will happend if the get mad about all those fake Trailers and wrong promisses ?
Maybe the Game Magazines then start to jump on the hate train too, as today none of them say anything about the Fact with the Trailers.
While on some EA Game People analyse a lot Trailers to blame the Company for what they did.
PGI had just the luck to be save on that for, the moment.

Do you ever asked yourself why you did not have this Game Menü PGI show you in the Trailer ?


Clear and nice Design, all Informations easy to find.
A Style worth a Mechwarrior Game i was so excited.
Then i bought the Game, see what Menu i finaly got and...take a drink to not get Mad.

Edited by Adrian Pride, 04 January 2020 - 09:39 AM.

[Koniving]

Appogee, on 04 January 2020 - 07:26 AM, said:

Understood. I was just adding that there's no performance reason why they couldn't have had animated NPCs in the Mech Lab.

As you say, it smacks of them (again) not finishing their product before selling it.

To translate Adrian a little better, as some of the English gets mixed up partway in...
"What PGI rescued" is meant to be "What rescued PGI", meaning this game would have flopped really hard if it straight up released on Steam because it was unfinished, buggy as hell, and had a lot of issues.

You can see many of the issues on the "War Stories" video, but on there they claim they fixed these issues. Many of them weren't quite fixed until after signing the Epic deal to have the revenue to hire additional people. With it came the support needed for the Unreal engine (which you're not entitled to because using the engine is free until your sales pass a certain point then you owe royalties, so unlike Cryengine which provided engine support until they went bankrupt, Unreal offered no support until the deal was signed. Any consultants before that had to be paid out of pocket at consultant rates, which I doubt PGI would have done.) Other issues still exist in the game, AI doesn't stop shooting if an ally is in the way. Tanks with MGs on the base will fire in any direction while aiming the turret at you. Spawning though much improved as I've recently seen is still leaving a bit to be desired. I also encountered a bug where Fahad started sinking into the floor after I successfully pushed him... and then he was gone until the next mission.


I was pretty upset about this too. I thought like UI 2.0 they "redesigned it" last minute, but honestly now it just seems like it was faked or possibly the concept look that they wanted to go for but never did. Many people complain about the UI's current look but nobody really brings up the look of the MechCon 2018 or this one.

MechCon 2018 also has a special file with a "boss" AI that's a LOT better than the base AI, I'm surprised they didn't just flat out use this..

[Koniving]

Also in a video interview with Sean Lang and Bombadil (sp?), Russ said the editor is ready to go and they were just waiting on the EULA (license agreement) to get pushed through but they had to wait for Epic's side to do that.

The two days later when I first watched the video, the moment I got to the point where he mentioned it I checked the launcher for the editor. The new EULA was up as it was the second one I have had to sign in an update to the editor.
And that was it. It's still an image. No editor.
PGI got back to work on the 2nd. If it's ready to go, then we should see it by next week at the latest, but I know we won't.

Perhaps it is reliant on Epic, as the Epic game store has no mod support at the moment. So even if you made a mod there's no easy toggle on/off for it or anything like that. Though in theory, this shouldn't stop editing, just kinda **** with mod distribution and how it's installed.
And if it isn't reliant on Epic's side, then like MW5... the editor isn't quite finished either and Russ tried to put Epic under the bus under the guise of winter vacation.

[Koniving]

As a quick update, I went around and counted the crew.
It's gone up or I've found people I haven't seen before.

There's 6 people total on the Leopard we all see, and 3 more on the bridge for travel. That's nine, but I shouldn't be surprised that PGI doesn't realize that not only does the 9 crew not include pilots, but it also doesn't include the technicians or security force. You wouldn't have an active security force unless expecting guests on board. ...Also wouldn't have gravity either unless actively traveling.

Their lack of activity, however, and placement on the "wrong side" of the dropship isn't helping. Also the lack of accommodation in this oversized dropship for the crew quarters and the like probably doesn't help the lifelessness of the ship. Guess everyone communally shares the Commander's bed and bathroom.

[Nesutizale]

I think PGI is sitting in between three chairs so to say.

The old interface from the trailer/MechCon looks nice but is also very game like with its big picture buttons.
The interface we have now feels like a step in between two other things. First thing that comes to my mind is a more "realistic" style, cause frankly the most practical interface or miliary interface would most likely look like this


The other style they seamed to have tried but didn't gotten right is a more "in the world" interface where you have different stations you actualy walk up to and can interact with. Like this


The map would actualy be on the table or as a hologramm over the table instead of the random planets you have now and you would interact with it.


So long story short....the current one is neither gamey, realistic or in world but weirdly in between all three.

[Appogee]

Nesutizale, on 04 January 2020 - 02:12 PM, said:

So long story short....the current one is neither gamey, realistic or in world but weirdly in between all three.

Excellent post, thanks.

Personally, I would have liked the realistic "dropship stations" approach, aided by hotkeys to jump to different positions.

I wonder whether the compromises and over-simplification we see in the UI are because PGI are planning to port MW5 to Xbox.

[Adrian Pride]

Koniving, on 04 January 2020 - 11:01 AM, said:

To translate Adrian a little better, as some of the English gets mixed up partway in...

Thank you for this, im just an old man who forget to speak/write english a lot
Very kind of you!

[Nesutizale]

Appogee, on 04 January 2020 - 03:16 PM, said:

Excellent post, thanks.

Personally, I would have liked the realistic "dropship stations" approach, aided by hotkeys to jump to different positions.

I wonder whether the compromises and over-simplification we see in the UI are because PGI are planning to port MW5 to Xbox.

Thanks.

I doubt that the UI we have now is the result of makeing a move to console. If anything that would make it worse, I think.
Consoles tend to have more big buttons and pictures and less jumping between different screens.

I also remember that Russ said in some interview/podcast that they wanted to change the UI more to a military look but I think that was more the mechs UI.

Anyway its like they had three approaches and did a bit of everything. For example in the current UI the top bar with "Home / Mechlab / Market .... " was allready in the MechCon trailer and is still there. Like they had the MechCon menu up and running, then one came by and said "Thats to gamey, lets make it more military style" and they started working on that and then someone came around and said "Look we can also have menues on actual screens in the game" and they started to work on that and then...time/money/knowledge was out and they where stuck with an UI in the transitional state its currently in.

Edited by Nesutizale, 05 January 2020 - 08:17 AM.