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Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by Sartoz on Apr 7, 2018 19:16:09 GMT
Well, well... It seems many ( including me) had a misconception about EA forcing Bio to use its engine. It was back in 2013 that Bio approached EA for the purpose of using FB for their open world DA:I and ME:A. FB is great for rendering large open areas which is what the studio wanted but failed ( imo ) to properly analyze its weaknesses... ie: not suited for RPG style games. Laidlaw, if anyone remembers, complained that the studio had to build tools for RPG style play. So, EA did not mandate its use. For details go to: EngadgetRead 4th paragraph after Meanwhile, at Electronic Arts HQ if you want to zero in quickly. So, one can argue that Bio can use other RPG friendly engines if they want to. ME game assets are worthless now and can be scrapped. DA4 is a reboot (as I understand) so what's keeping Bio tied to FB3? Unless, the studio is no longer interested in RPG style games. EDIT PS: Also : Confirmed by Flynn
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Post by wavebend on Apr 7, 2018 19:18:15 GMT
FB3 is no longer a problem for BioWare they've clearly adapted it to their own requirements
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Apr 7, 2018 19:43:29 GMT
They have been saying this since Dragon Age: Inquisition when asked about it, its nothing new. There are still going to be the people that will say "They are part of EA therefore they have to say it even if it isn't true".
I think they did fairly well moving Dragon Age: Inquisition to Frostbite and the problems for me wasn't the RPG elements there, but the focus on melee style combat. I think a lot of people are assuming that something in implemented in a way they don't like it is instantly the fault of Frostbite and not the people designing it.
Edit:
I think the biggest asset for BioWare with using Frostbite won't go away anytime soon and that is the access they have to Dice since they are also part of EA. I don't think they will be leaving Frostbite anytime since soon for I doubt they want to be running multiple game engines at BioWare.
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Apr 7, 2018 20:47:27 GMT
FB3 is no longer a problem for BioWare they've clearly adapted it to their own requirements clearly I can't wait to play Anthem on my PS4 and wait for the sound to load in after 10 seconds of silence between level transitions and the sound from all inputs in that time just comes crashing in all at once. Like, I can give you a friggin laundry list of features that are shared between Andromeda and DAI that stem from how Frostbite is utilized which feels either buggy or problematic to the enjoyment of the game. Even their navmesh and collision detection for environments is subpar next to most other AAA third person action games
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2018 20:56:02 GMT
Interesting read, thanks for the link.
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Post by SofaJockey on Apr 7, 2018 22:13:10 GMT
FB3 is no longer a problem for BioWare they've clearly adapted it to their own requirements clearly I can't wait to play Anthem on my PS4 and wait for the sound to load in after 10 seconds of silence between level transitions and the sound from all inputs in that time just comes crashing in all at once. Like, I can give you a friggin laundry list of features that are shared between Andromeda and DAI that stem from how Frostbite is utilized which feels either buggy or problematic to the enjoyment of the game. Even their navmesh and collision detection for environments is subpar next to most other AAA third person action games (fixed it for you)What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2018 22:23:46 GMT
(fixed it for you)What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story. Bloody hell SJ, that's all I'm going to see now. Now no one else will understand when I refer to Ryder as being 'Pingued'.
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Apr 7, 2018 22:32:22 GMT
What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Fsr, I thought you said "Praxley from MEA" so fuck me. But anyway, here's my full-ass tangent anyway: There's plenty of isolated moments where the animation isn't bad but it would still be worse than ME1 in almost every case, and granted, ME1 has some goofy stuff but at least it's expressive one way or the other. As for DA:I yeah, I think I replayed that half a year ago specifically to compare and while I still think it's not definitively better than ME3 or ME1/2 it was notably more human-looking and I'm pretty sure both that and MEA uses FaceFX to simulate the basic lip-sync before any of it gets hand-keyed and they also use that for all the non-cinematic dialogues. We do have some clues as to what went on with Andromeda's animations. They planned to mocap and handkey much more than what was done that way, as with the leaked 2014 footage of Drack's mission which in the final game has no fidelity of that sort. I've noticed in Andromeda that all the motion-capture cinematics have an issue where sometimes dialogue actually overlaps, and it sounds like the characters interrupt each other or play their next lines before they should, like the whole set of cutscene events are on rails but not synced up properly between animation and sound timings. I have a theory that Andromeda in an earlier stage didn't have the 4-tone dialogue wheel, which is complimented by this See, it's no surprise they had planned this as their primary interface for actual "choice" choices, but what is very curious about this concept art is the wheel's visual design that only has two options. So ever since I saw this, coupled with the animations we've all seen of much better animations of previous builds leads me to conclude, theoretically, that earlier in development Andromeda was supposed to be more on-rails with much less player-custom dialogue for Ryder which allowed cutscenes to all feature high fidelity motion captured faces akin to the ones in the final mission, but back then they also only had the loyalty missions and main mission planned, so it was feasible to spend the resources on a much more focused set of animations. As soon as it went open world and they decided Ryder needed more options to stay true to a BioWare formula and address ME3 criticisms, they realized the game would become inconsistent if they kept the high quality cinematic conversations but add in procedurally generated dialogue animations for side-conversations and NPCs. More importantly, doing fully choreographed cinematics down to the dialogue and face capture means you can't do nearly as much branching dialogue and you can't iterate on scenes the same way if the dialogue comes from a prescripted "acting" session. I really think originally BW Montreal was aiming to develop Andromeda like they developed Omega DLC, as a main linear story and then, as we know, they thought the exploration aspect could be done with big procedurally generated worlds, so perhaps those would've been more ME1-y and not DA:I-y. It's all speculations and I love that. The only other scapegoat to explain away MEA's strangely bad animations I can think of is that Anthem was Priority No. 1 and so BioWare used whatever advancements they made for gameplay and systems with Anthem to carry over to the Anthem team while all 3 other BioWare teams crunched on finaling MEA, but kept most of their animation talent on Anthem all that time leaving MEA understaffed on that front. I think we actually heard as much that in the final phases of MEA's development the animation teams were understaffed.
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Post by SofaJockey on Apr 7, 2018 22:34:59 GMT
Bloody hell SJ, that's all I'm going to see now. Now no one else will understand when I refer to Ryder as being 'Pingued'. Not my observation, sadly it has been recognized as 'a thing'...
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Post by freelancer82 on Apr 7, 2018 22:55:55 GMT
I think we actually heard as much that in the final phases of MEA's development the animation teams were understaffed. Yeah, thats what I heard too. At the end when you are rushing to get the product out on time, you need the most amount of people on the team.
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
Posts: 5,900 Likes: 8,927
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Apr 7, 2018 23:50:24 GMT
I think we actually heard as much that in the final phases of MEA's development the animation teams were understaffed. Yeah, thats what I heard too. At the end when you are rushing to get the product out on time, you need the most amount of people on the team. What I have gathered over the years is the animators are probably the most in demand members of the team for anything that moves is pretty much done by them. With how they were talking about how much bigger dialogue was in Andromeda I think they never planned to have enough animators for the game from the start. Its one of the reasons why I hope they stop going for the bigger is better approach and scale back a little so they won't wind up in the same situation.
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Post by Obsidian Gryphon on Apr 7, 2018 23:53:43 GMT
Since this is about EA and Bioware.
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Apr 8, 2018 0:16:05 GMT
I think we actually heard as much that in the final phases of MEA's development the animation teams were understaffed. Yeah, thats what I heard too. At the end when you are rushing to get the product out on time, you need the most amount of people on the team. And yet, I think these were crunching on Anthem for its E3 showcase. That said Andromeda did have a shitload of people working on it between summer 2016 and launch including the core Dragon Age staff and Patrick Weekes even.
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Post by hivemind on Apr 8, 2018 5:59:56 GMT
Riiiight.
BioWare choose Frostbite for DAI. They cried a lot.
BioWare choose Frostbite for MEA. They cried a lot. And they fucked their game as a result.
BioWare choose Forstbite for Anthem. BioWare is currently crying a lot. Will they fuck this game too as a result? Find out in 2019!
BioWare will never say anything bad about EA. EA most certaintly forced that engine upon them. Seeing how BW always struggle with forstbite, you'd think that after so many troubles with two games in a row they'l jump off this troublesome engine, but no - they continue to eat cactus. The only viable explanation to this would be that it's not up to BW to decide which engine to choose. From EA standpoint Frostbite is the best solution. It's a free engine, they don't have to pay anyone a licensing fees or diverge any additional resoures for developing a new engine from scratch. I see gazillion reasons for EA to choose Frostbite and 0 for BioWare.
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N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Apr 8, 2018 6:07:55 GMT
Riiiight. BioWare choose Frostbite for DAI. They cried a lot. BioWare choose Frostbite for MEA. They cried a lot. And they fucked their game as a result. BioWare choose Forstbite for Anthem. BioWare is currently crying a lot. Will they fuck this game too as a result? Find out in 2019! BioWare will never say anything bad about EA. EA most certaintly forced that engine upon them. Seeing how BW always struggle with forstbite, you'd think that after so many troubles with two games in a row they'l jump off this troublesome engine, but no - they continue to eat cactus. The only viable explanation to this would be that it's not up to BW to decide which engine to choose. From EA standpoint Frostbite is the best solution. It's a free engine, they don't have to pay anyone a licensing fees or diverge any additional resoures for developing a new engine from scratch. I see gazillion reasons for EA to choose Frostbite and 0 for BioWare. This is why BioWare doesn't communicate with the community anymore for nobody wants to even give them any benefit they are telling the truth unless its to say that "EA is the worst company ever made" because otherwise "they are just forced to say nice things because we know better because of Reddit". As far as you not being able to see positives for BioWare using Frostbite it doesn't mean there aren't any.
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Post by river82 on Apr 8, 2018 8:24:37 GMT
I remember the days when Bioware devs (1 writer and 1 co-owner that I recall) were so high on success they would publicly shit on the JRPG genre/games. I remember thinking they should be careful doing that because there will come a time when people will publicly shit on their games and they aren't going to like it.
Fast forward 8 years ...
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giubba
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire
Origin: Giubba
PSN: Giubba1985
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Post by giubba on Apr 8, 2018 10:11:30 GMT
clearly I can't wait to play Anthem on my PS4 and wait for the sound to load in after 10 seconds of silence between level transitions and the sound from all inputs in that time just comes crashing in all at once. Like, I can give you a friggin laundry list of features that are shared between Andromeda and DAI that stem from how Frostbite is utilized which feels either buggy or problematic to the enjoyment of the game. Even their navmesh and collision detection for environments is subpar next to most other AAA third person action games (fixed it for you)What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story. If i remember correctly the main problem with MEA facial animation came from the fact that in the middle of the development (or a later stage) they choose to shift from maya to another 3D tool (or viceversa) so they had to basically restart from 0. It was in that kotaku article. EDIT: Ah told you "Three people who worked on the game point to one critical moment early in pre-production, when BioWare decided to switch animation programs from 3D Studio Max to Maya, as a move that cost technical animators a great deal of work. Although it was seen as a necessary overhaul by BioWare’s leadership—Autodesk, the company behind both 3DS Max and Maya, was recommending that game developers shift gears—the animators were upset that it happened during pre-production rather than before they’d started working at all. “All that technology was invalid, simply because we’d used a red pen instead of a blue pen,” said one developer, lamenting the months of progress they lost. (Later, some of Andromeda’s animators wound up using 3DS Max for a large chunk of their work anyway.)"
kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
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Agent 46
Clearance Level Ultra
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: ALoneGretchin
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Post by Gileadan on Apr 8, 2018 10:28:51 GMT
What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story. It may be less puzzling than you think right now. As far as I know, models and animations are not created within the engine itself - they are made with 3rd party products like Maya or 3DS max, then exported from there and imported into the actual graphics engine, in this case Frostbite. Meaning that by the time the model is imported to the engine, the quality (or lack thereof) of the model and animation in question are already decided. It comes down to the skill of the modeler / animator and maybe to how much experience they have with that 3rd party software. Frostbite has likely nothing to do with it, though it may look like a convenient scapegoat to some.
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Post by Unicephalon 40-D on Apr 8, 2018 10:34:36 GMT
What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story. It may be less puzzling than you think right now. As far as I know, models and animations are not created within the engine itself - they are made with 3rd party products like Maya or 3DS max, then exported from there and imported into the actual graphics engine, in this case Frostbite. Meaning that by the time the model is imported to the engine, the quality (or lack thereof) of the model and animation in question are already decided. It comes down to the skill of the modeler / animator and maybe to how much experience they have with that 3rd party software. Frostbite has likely nothing to do with it, though it may look like a convenient scapegoat to some. The quality can be affected by the engine, but I suspect it rarely does so in the larger productions, as these are tested before taken into use. I've done this (modelling, animating, lighting, texturing, staging, converting) in my "previous life" so to say, and the things affecting were mostly 1. bugs in the 3D software itself, 2. bugs in converting chain / model format in the conversion tool (format to another format (and in one case, even to another format from that conversion :gasp: )) .. "It comes down to the skill of the modeler / animator and maybe to how much experience they have with that 3rd party software" yes.
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Post by hivemind on Apr 8, 2018 11:18:15 GMT
What's so puzzling is that the animation in DAI was fine. And Praxley in Anthem looks good. Maybe one day we'll hear what was behind MEA's animation. I suspect Frostbite is not the whole story. It may be less puzzling than you think right now. As far as I know, models and animations are not created within the engine itself - they are made with 3rd party products like Maya or 3DS max, then exported from there and imported into the actual graphics engine, in this case Frostbite. Meaning that by the time the model is imported to the engine, the quality (or lack thereof) of the model and animation in question are already decided. It comes down to the skill of the modeler / animator and maybe to how much experience they have with that 3rd party software. Frostbite has likely nothing to do with it, though it may look like a convenient scapegoat to some. Jason Shreier mentioned that MEA development team struggled with implementing the ingame animation rig - the system that manages the gameplay animations. The natural blending between animations, simultinius run of different animations (run+fire; jump+reload; differenth aiming offsets and etc.) This stuff can get very complicated very fast. And since the animation team was highly understuffed, no wonder it was in such a bad state by the time of the release. Speaking of animation - there was also this rather bizzare approach to facial animation. In games like Mass Effect, which have a crapload of fully voiced dialogues, the use of fully procedural systems like FaceFX is a necessity. Sure, it looks less natural when compared to performance capture, but it helps to bring the amount of content that bioware were aiming. If you've closely followed MEA development then you remember how excited Aaryn Flynn was about the use of Facial Capture. It should have ring the bells back then. Performance capture is too expensive for the type of a game that BioWare were making. They either had to shorten the amount of dialogues to the point of making the story linear or by highly compromising the process of facial capture. And they obviously chose the latter. The end result looks like they captured body animations from one actor at one time, recorded VO in a different time by a differenth actor (both player's VAs were recording voices only in a recording booth and not in mocap studio) and then slap on top of it the facial performance of third actor. I can only guess why they choose this style, but my bet is on the fact, that BioWare were so hungry to use facial capture that they were willing to go for such compromises.
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N5
Agent 46
Clearance Level Ultra
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
Origin: ALoneGretchin
Posts: 2,671 Likes: 6,651
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Post by Gileadan on Apr 8, 2018 12:32:24 GMT
It may be less puzzling than you think right now. As far as I know, models and animations are not created within the engine itself - they are made with 3rd party products like Maya or 3DS max, then exported from there and imported into the actual graphics engine, in this case Frostbite. Meaning that by the time the model is imported to the engine, the quality (or lack thereof) of the model and animation in question are already decided. It comes down to the skill of the modeler / animator and maybe to how much experience they have with that 3rd party software. Frostbite has likely nothing to do with it, though it may look like a convenient scapegoat to some. Jason Shreier mentioned that MEA development team struggled with implementing the ingame animation rig - the system that manages the gameplay animations. The natural blending between animations, simultinius run of different animations (run+fire; jump+reload; differenth aiming offsets and etc.) This stuff can get very complicated very fast. And since the animation team was highly understuffed, no wonder it was in such a bad state by the time of the release. Speaking of animation - there was also this rather bizzare approach to facial animation. In games like Mass Effect, which have a crapload of fully voiced dialogues, the use of fully procedural systems like FaceFX is a necessity. Sure, it looks less natural when compared to performance capture, but it helps to bring the amount of content that bioware were aiming. If you've closely followed MEA development then you remember how excited Aaryn Flynn was about the use of Facial Capture. It should have ring the bells back then. Performance capture is too expensive for the type of a game that BioWare were making. They either had to shorten the amount of dialogues to the point of making the story linear or by highly compromising the process of facial capture. And they obviously chose the latter. The end result looks like they captured body animations from one actor at one time, recorded VO in a different time by a differenth actor (both player's VAs were recording voices only in a recording booth and not in mocap studio) and then slap on top of it the facial performance of third actor. I can only guess why they choose this style, but my bet is on the fact, that BioWare were so hungry to use facial capture that they were willing to go for such compromises. Good points. I found this video by Extra Credits/game animator Daniel Floyd pretty enlightening. It's 20 minutes long, so the TLDR is... it could have been nearly anything.
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire
Origin: Giubba
PSN: Giubba1985
Posts: 543 Likes: 554
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Post by giubba on Apr 8, 2018 13:17:20 GMT
Jason Shreier mentioned that MEA development team struggled with implementing the ingame animation rig - the system that manages the gameplay animations. The natural blending between animations, simultinius run of different animations (run+fire; jump+reload; differenth aiming offsets and etc.) This stuff can get very complicated very fast. And since the animation team was highly understuffed, no wonder it was in such a bad state by the time of the release. Speaking of animation - there was also this rather bizzare approach to facial animation. In games like Mass Effect, which have a crapload of fully voiced dialogues, the use of fully procedural systems like FaceFX is a necessity. Sure, it looks less natural when compared to performance capture, but it helps to bring the amount of content that bioware were aiming. If you've closely followed MEA development then you remember how excited Aaryn Flynn was about the use of Facial Capture. It should have ring the bells back then. Performance capture is too expensive for the type of a game that BioWare were making. They either had to shorten the amount of dialogues to the point of making the story linear or by highly compromising the process of facial capture. And they obviously chose the latter. The end result looks like they captured body animations from one actor at one time, recorded VO in a different time by a differenth actor (both player's VAs were recording voices only in a recording booth and not in mocap studio) and then slap on top of it the facial performance of third actor. I can only guess why they choose this style, but my bet is on the fact, that BioWare were so hungry to use facial capture that they were willing to go for such compromises. Good points. I found this video by Extra Credits/game animator David Floyd pretty enlightening. It's 20 minutes long, so the TLDR is... it could have been nearly anything. Oh god strike me down, a youtube video that's not some cancerous rant and give some real information about a videogame problem. Is this a sign of the apocalypse?
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Post by Pearl on Apr 8, 2018 13:42:34 GMT
Good points. I found this video by Extra Credits/game animator David Floyd pretty enlightening. It's 20 minutes long, so the TLDR is... it could have been nearly anything. Oh god strike me down, a youtube video that's not some cancerous rant and give some really information about a videogame problem. Is this a sign of the apocalypse? ExtraCredits, in general, is pretty good about staying away from ranty videos.
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Post by SofaJockey on Apr 8, 2018 14:02:43 GMT
I like Extra Credits, though they get criticized for trying to explain why developers do things rather than lambasting all games companies for being shit...
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Post by Sanunes on Apr 8, 2018 14:18:32 GMT
I like Extra Credits, though they get criticized for trying to explain why developers do things rather than lambasting all games companies for being shit... Yep, if you don't rant and rave about how all publishers and developers aside from CDPR are out to screw the poor innocent player there are plenty of places that will criticize them for it. Its just like I posted above if a BioWare employee posted something it will be considered false if it is neutral or positive towards EA, but if its close to a criticism it must be believed at all cost. That was in perfect display when Manveer Heir left BioWare, until he left he was public enemy #1, but after he left the negative things he said about working at BioWare Montreal must be believed at all cost because he worked there.
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