Posted 28 January 2015 - 06:18 PM

Hey guys, let me address some of the concerns and observations made here.



It’s true that some mechs need a TLC pass, that’s evident in the DWF and WHK, part of the problem stems from the fact that they were released in a pack so there’s less animation man-hours available to work in them, as opposed to other mechs released individually.



The wonky behavior of the DWF in slopes is a mix of code and animation issues, we’re looking into this. Regarding its “prancing and bouncing”, I have to agree that for its weight class is way too much, and the same goes for other mechs mentioned in this thread.

Bear in mind that animators also try to give each mech a distinctive motion where possible, as the more mechs are released the harder it is to make them stand out in the crowd.

Back in the day, it was really easy to spot a Trebuchet out of an incoming lance. Nowadays a distinctive silhouette is not enough to distinguish who is who in a crowded battlefield, so we try to make up for that with animation (to the extent that is possible to do that with a hulking walking tank).

Albeit the DWF weighs 100 tons, you still need to make sure the anim cover the distance when it runs @ 50kph. So the speeding up of the animation compounds the kinks and bounces and makes them all the more evident.

Anyways, we’ll give the mechs mentioned in this thread a good revisiting, so they move and look the part.



The ground detection (a.k.a runtime leg IK) is a source of frustration too for us since the start.

When we first started to implement it, the first hurdle we encountered is that the sheer size of the mechs made the built-in ground detection inaccurate.

Once coders got around it and got it working (as the cool pic of the hunchback shows), the problem became the overhead in raytracing two feet times a dozen plus mechs, which is what you regularly see on-screen in a regular match.



Coders again sought solutions to deal with that bandwidth problem, but then kinks would appear such as legs still flexing after re-entering level ground, which looked a lot worse than not having the IK at all. So it was a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, which is why IK is off for the time being. This is a bummer (understatement of the year so far), and as animators are very fastidious about their work, you can be sure we’re the first to be very frustrated by this issue.



This doesn’t mean we’re still not looking for a solution. In the meantime, every new mech is still rigged with the bells and whistles needed to detect ground, for when the time comes to flick the switch back on.



Enrique Barahona Ramos



El Señor Animador.

