Cpl Steiner Posted December 28, 2006 Share Posted December 28, 2006 Hi, I've been playing "Medieval 2 Total War" a lot lately. It may be a "lite" wargame (in fact even using the term wargame is stretching it a bit) but I absolutely love watching the battles. This is mainly because of the beautiful animation of all the soldiers and the subtle variations between models of the same unit type. Now I know that BFC is only a small company, and that this is just "chrome" with no real effect on game resolution, but I am hoping that BFC will see the potential for added sales in this area and try to emulate some of the visual splender of mass-market games like M2TW. Having seen some of CMSF's in-game models I am already very impressed. Now, if they can just move as beatifully as they look, I will be in Seventh Heaven. I want to see my CMx2 soldiers limbering up for battle, tapping magazines on their helmets, cocking their rifles etc. I know this sounds like fluff but I think it will bring in thousands of players who would normally not buy the game. How about it BFC? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 There is only so much we can do. The animations will be very good, but non-critical stuff like tapping magazines to helmets will not be included. We have neither the time nor the money to do this. Our existing animation schedule is already extremely full. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cpl Steiner Posted December 29, 2006 Author Share Posted December 29, 2006 Steve, Thanks for replying and I totally understand. I am sure you guys will produce the highest quality animations that your budget allows. All I would add though is that there are probably some relatively easy animations and some relatively hard ones for the same basic effect. Tapping magazines on helmets was perhaps a bad choice. If there could be even a slight improvement from the CMx1 swivelling heads etc., then I am sure it will help immensely. I hope we get to see some animations soon. Thanks again for your reply. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homo ferricus Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 so are you guys doing the whole dress up in a sensor suit and dance in front of a green screen thing for animations this time around? sorry, completely forgot the technical name for it 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M1A1TC Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 Its called Motion Capture, or MoCap. I think BFC already said that animations are done by hand. MoCap is very expensive 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homo ferricus Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 a yes, thanks for the correction. but i remember somethink about BFC saying that they are somehow doing the animations better this time around. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 No worries about the quality of the animations being vastly superior to CMx1. Even the quick placeholders we have now are night and day different. The thing about stuff like tapping a magazine to a helmet (which IS a good example, BTW) is that there has to be special coding to tell the model when it is a good time to do it and when it isn't. On top of that it has to be done only for specific models, otherwise you'd have a machine gunner tapping an empty hand to his helmet Worse, you have to allow for all the various possible positions the guy could be in to do this action. So you're probably talking about a dozen or so animations for the two sides (Syrian helmets are different shaped so the animations have to be altered to match up). Currently we have about 600 animations we need to do. Some are as simple as moving a hand from one position to another, others are quite involved. The majority are simply alterations of others so that hands line up with different weapons and what not, such as a firing pose for a M4 being basically the same as an AKM, just not identical. So yeah... you're going to get a lot of realism put in front of you. What you aren't going to get are esoteric stuff. It's just not something we feel we have the time for. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homo ferricus Posted December 29, 2006 Share Posted December 29, 2006 sounds good, quite frankly i wasn't really expecting much more variation in types of animations than in CMX1, i just expected them to look, well, more human. actually, the animations in CMX1 weren't terrible either, i didn't really have a huge problem dealing with abstractions and stuff like a squad turning around wihout moving its legs, but now that i think about it it WAS pretty ridiculous. I guess i have a good imagination 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cpl Steiner Posted December 30, 2006 Author Share Posted December 30, 2006 Although I love the animations in M2TW even that monster of a game doesn't bother with some animations deemed "non-critical" as Steve puts it. For instance, in M2TW I've seen ballistas and their crews walk right through a solid stone wall. Obviously not everything is worth animating even with that game's massive budget. It will be interesting to see what approach BFC takes re. walls and fences but I imagine some sort of abstraction is inevitable. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moronic Max Posted December 30, 2006 Share Posted December 30, 2006 Will we see any animations a la the Hot Coffee mod for GTA: San Andreas? I mean, that'd boost sales, right? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.