General Category > AVWW Mods & Maps

Crowd-sourcing animation?

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Bluddy:
One of the complaints that's been leveled against the game's looks is that the animation is stiff. This is one I tend to agree with, and we all know the reason for it -- it takes time and money to do animation and there are many many characters in the game. I've been thinking though: there are probably a few people on the forums who are pretty good with pixel graphics and could try to slowly fill in the gaps in the animation. The key here is that this is something that can be done slowly over time. Preferably, one animation at a time could be added per character, so that you don't suddenly have one character that's fully animated while others aren't animated at all.

What do the devs think of this idea?
Also, could you explain the way the characters were rendered, and how we could go about filling in the gaps (if it's possible?) I see that while running has a full dictionary of movements, the other 'animations' are just static pictures.

x4000:
I don't think it's feasible.

1. The character models can't be distributed free of charge, so individual animators would have $400+ to shell out to help at all, and then $20+ per character after that. I can't imagine anyone volunteering.

2. Accepting free art is always tricky. If it stands out from the rest of the art, all the other art is forevermore committed to looking the same way. Relying on volunteers to do this seems super risky.

3. In general, I don't want any more frames of animation added to characters. Just adding two new animations per character/monster would triple loading times in my estimation, and send ram usage spiraling upwards.

In general, if people want high-fi graphics, Arcen is not the company for them. We exploit the performance gains and low ram use of having lower-fi animations. Even if we had unlimited money and a staff of 200, I don't believe that you can make games of this scale and variety while also trying for either full 3d or large-framecount-sprite 2d graphics. Not on current generation hardware.

That's part of why nobody else does games like this, or they just do them in pixelart. There are ways around some of those constraints with background loading/unloading, but that makes framerates choppy. And there are ways around some of them with certain styles of hand-drawn multi-component character art. But that requires extremely skilled artists paired with a completely new character animation subsystem to go along with it. If we had unlimited money, perhaps that would be what I'd pursue. But I don't think crowd sourcing that would work; art creation is enormously intensive and personal, and even if we had that many talented artists who were fans, their styles wouldn't be likely to match each other. And if they ever left, I'd be unable to add more characters/monsters.

Bluddy:
OK well if the character models can't be distributed for free, that kills the idea right there :)

I was thinking it shouldn't be too hard to position a character model in the positions needed for animation and then rendering it. Using the same character models would also mean that it would be fairly standardized: an animation either looks good or it doesn't, and you can't have too much free rein when you're using an existing character model, so you wouldn't feel like a hundred different hands drew the graphic or something like that.

I appreciate the technical limitations Chris, but I also noticed that you tend to be fairly conservative in this regard. That's cool, I mean, it seems like you're an engineer at heart, so every performance drop hurts and I identify with that being an engineer myself, but AVWW is barely pushing anything near the limits of the current GPUs other than perhaps the 1024x1024 size textures which weren't supported up until a few years ago. I think that in general, if there's a will there's a way, especially since we're not talking about stuff that's so far out of the technical limitations of current hardware, and since the game is not really at the 'teetering point' where adding some stuff is going to kill performance on everybody's computers. At the very worst you could have the full animation be only for high end computers, which is what the AAA game companies do anyway.

But like I said, the $400+ entry fee is the real problem here, so the other stuff doesn't really matter.

x4000:
Yep; if it were a matter of just positioning the character models for animations, that would be something that would be reasonably standardized.  To do that requires Daz 3D, though, which is expensive if you don't have it.  And then to get the props needed for each character varies in price, but could be anywhere from $5 to $60 depending on the current prices.  I bought all those things on incredible discount originally, so most characters only cost me $6 to $10 total, but that was at $2 a prop instead of the usual $18, that sort of thing.

In terms of the hardware limitations, we are bumping up against them actually.  RAM use, not GPU use, is the concern.  And loading times.  Nothing about having more animation frames would even impact render performance (or GPU load) remotely at all.  Once you were in the game and it was running, it wouldn't matter if we had 10,000 frames of animation or 25, the load on the GPU and the performance is literally the same -- because either way, you're only drawing one frame from one sprite dictionary at a time.

But the process is a 32 bit application with the RAM limitations that implies, and any new art asset that is added has to be streamed off the disk every time you switch regions or load the game or encounter a new character for the first time.  You get a linear increase in load times when you add more frames.

Anyway, hopefully that explains my comments on the technical limitations more -- I'm not being overly conservative, we've literally had crashes relating to RAM use and right now are just maintaining a healthy distance from that point by virtue of the region switching thing.  If each monster/character graphic was using 5X as much RAM, we'd have to introduce some sort of new intra-region RAM dump points (which is tricky because we can't see exactly how much unmanaged memory is even in use, unlike with the managed memory; we could come up with ways to infer it in terms of textures specifically, but that's messy and incomplete).

And you're right, I'm definitely an engineer at heart, and approach problems that way.  If there's not a 2:1 buffer from failure I'm not happy.  And even now there's only like a 1.5:1 buffer from failure from RAM use via textures, so I'm definitely not being paranoid in an unwarranted sense.  Just ask c4sc4 or a few others who actually had the crashes prior, heh.

keith.lamothe:
Yea, in order for a game like this to have lots more animations per character (and smooth ones) I figure it'd either need:

- A very sophisticated approach to dropping textures you don't need very shortly after no longer needed them, and getting them back off disk before you need them again to avoid flicker/pop-in.

or

- Full-on 3D rendering so the animation is actually done by moving the parts of the model around at runtime, thus drastically reducing the amount of additional texture memory needed for animation.  But that has all kinds of other performance costs (and of course would be a completely different game), and there's no way we could draw the characters in nearly as much detail except on really beastly computers.

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