Add new comment

Good and realistic lookin (IK) cloth animation still is a huge hardware eater. Multiplied with the number of characters in a usual MMO game scene, kills any hardware existing right now.

In fact what's ugly about EQ2 is that even on high-end hardware you can only keep five models or so at full detail.

What I wrote about the cloth animation is like a comparison with what happened way back with the 3D engines. The levels were always precompiled. The same about the cloth animation. Why do you want to render the animation in real time when you can instead just simullate the movement on a dedicated editor/render, record the animation and then have it fixed in the game without any hardware overhead.

It would look better and it wouldn't cripple the framerate.

And in the case of EQ2 and Vaguard it's not the animation technology they use to make the game ugly (even if EQ2 makes the body parts twist HORRIBLY) but the animations themselves that are quite bad, bad synch, monster sliding on the terrain as they walk and so on for a quite long list of glitches and inconsistences.

Take for example the list of glitches I've compiled in a few minutes just by looking at the latest adventure pack they added:

- Characters twisting their head to look at you. This "emote" should be restricted to happen at 60 degree max, instead of 90 (or at least move even the torso to accomodate wider angles). Plus I'd build a system so that this "emote" isn't always on on every character and monster, but flagged and enabled manually when appropriate (in many cases it isn't). Plus also disable it while the character is busy with another action, add a delay so that the head doesn't twist back and forward quickly as it happens in a few cases and then also flag it to happen only in certain cases (or better, let the designers disable it under set circumstances).