9 réponses à ce sujet

[Arppis]

Why does the character carry the staff on his back in the first place? Why can't he just hold it in his hand? 

I don't know, but it kinda looks silly. I mean, it's not like Hawke or Warden does any climbing or something.

[Allan Schumacher]

Wulfram wrote...

You're probably going to want the character to gesture, and you don't want to spend a whole bunch of resources for special animations that make this not look silly with a great big stick in their hands.

This is going to be a large reason.  Especially if we have animations set up that aren't explicitly used in a controlled cutscene.

If we just kept it attached at the end in the same spot, it'd act REALLY REALLY weird because it'd often end up looking weightless and things like that, as it spins around.  They're also clipping nightmares.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 19 décembre 2012 - 07:47 .

[Allan Schumacher]

In SWTOR, Consular/Inquisitor is the Bioware Mage from the Holy Trinity, they use Lightstaff (double blade lightsaber), it have become an icon for Mage type class in Bioware

I was always under the impression that consulars were best suited for a single bladed saber (with dueling to boot) since they don't get the BAB to compensate for the 2-handed penalty.

[Allan Schumacher]

You're thinking KotOR not SWtOR.

In SWtOR, Sages equip single sabre but never use it to attack anything after they get their advanced class because they're pure casters, while Shadows use a doublebladed lightsaber but aren't really casters.

Oh! Hah! I figured since we weren't talking about an MMO (DA3), I did totally read that as KOTOR. Especially since that's where Consulars were introduced in a video game setting. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

[Allan Schumacher]

bombspy wrote...

But you admit that it looks weird as well if your staff just floats a few cm away from you back in the air.

Actually, it doesn't bother me as a gamer at all.  I can't really say why.  It didn't bother me before I started working for a game dev either.  /shrug

Yes, it doesn't look realistic.  But a strict adherence to realism isn't something that I think is necessary in my gaming tastes.

I hope Bioware finds finally a way to add the weapons believable to the characters. Frostbite 2 should have enough ressources to make it possible.

Please no hover weapons anymore.

It's not really an engine thing.  It's a "account for all the variations" thing.  The post above yours says "Well, shoot. Can't make left arm NOT to make gestures and instead being the hand where you could hold stuff in?"

We could make the left arm not make gestures, but that means that the left arm will then pretty much never make gestures, because making double the animations to accommodate for these is a non-trivial thing to do.  Right now, all characters, regardless of class (and I think even gender) will use the same base animation for running.  As long as that run animation looks good, we cover 6 variations on that alone (not counting that the same animation can probably still be used for elves and dwarves too).

Suddenly we add a staff to the mages, and now we've gone from one animation for running, to at least two, possibly 3 if we find that the elf mage needs special considerations.

Say we have 4 standard emotes that frequently get used in talking that use both hands.  If we're keeping weapons in the hand, suddenly those emotes have to be done in a way that not only takes into account the fact that there may be weapons in their hands, but also different types of weapons.  This will end up placing restrictions on either the way the weapons can look, or the way the emotes behave.  Unless, of course, we make custom animations for each permutation.  Which is prohibitively expensive.  We go from 4 standard emotes to maybe 1 (no variation with the same weapons) for each weapon type.  Or we start exploding into 8, 12, 16 animations.


Of course, competition is going to exert some pressure.  People will look at Geralt and go "BioWare, give me scabbards like they did!"  I think it's easier to do when you have a more fixed protagonist (Geralt has two swords, and they'll always be in the same place) because anticipating the permutations becomes easier.

I don't suspect we'll always have floating weapons from now until forever.  I just think that, as a gamer myself, it's typically on the "nice to have" variety.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 19 décembre 2012 - 09:22 .

[Allan Schumacher]

How about a... *hides behind sofa* ... toggle that can let us just turn them off when they aren't being used.

As in hide the weapons outright? It's certainly more doable than several animations.

A blanket solution of "hide weapons" would have potential problems with some scenes, so unfortunately I wouldn't consider it trivial. Situations where weapons did need to be drawn in a cinematic, and stuff like that. Might not be too difficult to do. I wouldn't know the finer details of what all is involved, unfortunately.

[Allan Schumacher]

The thing that most folks may not have noticed about Geralt's swords is that the only thing that was different about them was their hilts. The blades are all of uniform length, shape, and width. The crossguard and the pommels differed, but all steel swords and all silver swords all still had the same respective dimensions in order for the animations and scabbards to work with them.

I think there are some slight differences in the shape, but yes, I think there's a fairly well defined bounding box of where the weapons must go.

I imagine that it could be easy to fix such issues in Dragon Age. All that would have to happen is that all weapons of each type must adhere to standardized sizes and shapes for certain parts, specifically the area where the hands grip, and the area around where the weapon attaches to the back. If you can guarantee that the 3D space around the weapon's attachment point will always be the same size, then the developers can get rid of the floatiness and possibly even toss in a scabbard or a carrying strap. If they vary in size, shape, and look, then this rapidly becomes a much more expensive endeavor.

Yeah. I mean, it's just a different type of restriction on the design (one which I think I mentioned), and it is possible. Geralt's armor is customizable too, but in a quick look on the wikia page, unsurprisingly there's a bounding box constraint there too.

If Geralt could also be more "heavy plate" or mage like, there would have had to be restrictions there.

[Fiddzz]

For me I have never really minded weapons on the back floating, I even think I prefer it. Most of the DA games (and games like it, WoW, 3rd person rpgs, etc) you are always looking at the back of your character, I like seeing my new awesome weapon with its fire enchant than my characters cloak.

[Fiddzz]

For context as well, when I game I don't do "massive immersion". So floaty weapons and other things like that don't pull me out of the game and break the roleplay like it does for some people.

[Allan Schumacher]

On a serious note, I thought scabbards were a REALLY nice touch in Witcher 2. It must be something that costs a lot of resources because the majority of fantasy RPGs suffer similar problems to DA.

It's more an issue that Geralt is known to always have two swords at any given time, and nothing else. Even then, when escorting a chained NPC around, my swords actually ended up clipping like mad through the scabbard (the silver sword in particular), so there's other issues that come with having the scabbard. I agree they are a nice touch, but I think they are easier to do with a fixed character and less customization.