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Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

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Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#211

Post by larschdk »

ux-app wrote: post #106
SirMaster wrote: post #26

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

I think there is also a difference between realistic and believable. The original Half-Life had IMHO more believable leg/feet movement. In HL, the feet were much more "stuck to the ground" compared to most modern games where they just slide around.

It appears much more believable to me than the character pathing demo, where the character moonwalks 1/2 the time. The entire pedal structure is extremely stiff compared to how humans move (feet, thigh and torso can all turn nearly 90 degrees, but they hardly turn at all in the demo). The other demos are better, but their bodies still appear stiff, like they are suffering from hernia.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#212

Post by Cthulhu_ »

fulafel wrote: post #183
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.

Conflicting requirements stemming from the psychological illusion of movement spontaniety. People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.

> People don't want the realistic, slow response.

That's it, there's the tradeoff; if they want legs to move naturally, they have to fight against what the user inputs. There's a setting in the Witcher 3 so that the character can turn on a dime / instantly, less realistic but more fun / responsive: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/difference-between-standard...

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#213

Post by alpaca128 »

kylebenzle wrote: post #159
alpaca128 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the problems occur during movement, when responsiveness doesn't even matter. I still have yet to see a game where it's impossible to get randomly stuck at a fence or rock that instantly stops one's movement for example. Making the character dynamically avoid such minor obstacles would make the game more responsive, not less. And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less co…

I don't play any video games but it seems like you might be discussing a separate issue. A developer must choose between responsiveness and fluidity.

Responsiveness doesn't play a role in what I'm talking about. And if Boston Dynamics can integrate it into real-life robots to some degree then it can also be done in games.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#214

Post by taneq »

SirMaster wrote: post #26

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

That first video looks like deliberately testing the pathological case for locomotion. The second video looks hugely much better. In fact, it's so much better that I half wonder if the first video (which is shown as a demo of their voxel based pathing, not their animation system) is from before they implemented motion matching animation.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#215

Post by qiine »

pixelpoet wrote: post #100
Centigonal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remedy was started by Demoscene hackers, including a bunch of Future Crew folks. You can draw a pretty clean line from the incredible Second Reality demo[1] in 1993 to Alan Wake 2 thirty years later. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes

Not to mention crucial middleware like Umbra visibility, the development of Nvidia's RTX, an AI revolution or two, ... As I've commented before on HN, honestly I could write a small book about these Finnish demoscene gods.

> development of Nvidia's RTX

like convincing Nvidia that dedicating silicon to RT calc was worth it, or writing part of the acceleration structures they use now ?

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#216

Post by scbrg »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #74
rstat1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reason for refusing to give the Epic store money is pretty simple: Paid exclusives are bullshit. Especially when they're used as fodder to promote "competition", when such things are anything but.

That’s fair. I view it as just business. It certainly doesn’t affect me or any consumer. It only affects Valve, which I don’t care about. Maybe valve should pay developers more. Epic takes far less than steam does from developers, so I definitely understand the appeal to developers.

> It certainly doesn’t affect me or any consumer.

  $ ./EpicInstaller-15.17.1.msi 
  bash: ./EpicInstaller-15.17.1.msi: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
Turns out Epic doesn't work on my platform of choice. Apparently it does affect me. Certainly.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#217

Post by fennecfoxy »

I meeeeeean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KOQkZOusE Following on from the old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTqVhcrilrE

Seems Alan Wake still has a bit of foot sliding. I wonder if they're still essentially playing an animation while moving the character "object" in a direction.

Surely someone's already come up with a system where the character object isn't directly moved but instead moved in relation to an anchor, ie anchor foot to ground, taking a step naturally moves the character, now the foot in front anchors to the ground as the foot behind lifts.

Done this way it would be cool to simulate slippery surfaces along with the ml animation models to get interesting "scrabbling for grip" effects like you see in the BD robots whenever they're kicked/on ice.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#218

Post by fennecfoxy »

ux-app wrote: post #106
SirMaster wrote: post #26

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

I don't see how that enables foot sliding unless it's a lazy solution tho? A no foot-sliding solution can be snappy, you just have to increase animation speed so the character is "ready" to execute the players input faster.

I think the real issue is the difference between moving the entire character as an object, with the walking animation being supplementary to that vs the walking animation being central to the character whose object moves because of the animation.

But for a game like this, arcadey instant direction change type movement doesn't really seem warranted either.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#219

Post by fennecfoxy »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #152
ux-app wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

To elaborate on this, there is a third aspect being glossed over: the correctness of the animation itself. They could alter the animation such that feet don't slide across the ground and keep responsive movement. The result would be a worse quality animation, because the movement of the legs would not appear to be pushing the rest of the body around. Instead, it would look more like the feet are following the rest of…

As mentioned in other comments, I think a big thing is the difference between the older way of doing it ie you have a character object that you move along a vector and the animation is supplementary to this to make it look like they're walking, vs animating the walk and then having the animation/movement of the character itself actually move the character through the world (which almost nobody seems to do).

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#220

Post by fennecfoxy »

simbolit wrote: post #2

Love the tone of the article. Example: Our marketing folks would say the characters are more responsive and lifelike than ever before; our internal dev notes described it as "the characters won't bump or get stuck into objects in tight spaces".

I mean, the latter part of that sentence is still all marketing language. The whole sentence is marketing. The comedy in it is marketing.
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