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Animations/immersion

#1

Will the game have animations for example for hunting? Like actually killing the prey, gutting it, carrying it and using the parts for different purposes like tannering, cooking etc.? I think it would add more depth and immersion to the game. I hope the hunting won’t be something like in Banished where the hunter just walks next to a deer, does something with his hands, deer magically turns into piles of meat, hunter picks it up and puts the stuff into his pockets…
In Age of Empires the hunting was actually pretty good. Like they would actually take the meat from the animal after killing it and carrying the pieces to home. I hope that the game will have animations like these. I’d also hope for animations for farming like crouching to pick up the harvest and then carrying it to some storage and then coming back to continue the work.

I hope other people would say something to this what they’d like for animations and immersion. Sorry for my English if you didn’t catch my meaning and good day to y’all.

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#2

I absolutely agree and hope that there are many unique animations.
Animations can be difficult to make, not only because of their complexity but also ensuring that they work in all environments correctly. That being said, animations are one of the critical components that make or break immersion. Immersion itself is one of the critical components that make or break a simulation game.

[Unknown author =( ]

Hunting
Fishing
Pottery
Cooking
Weaving
Farming
Rituals/Dance

and many more!

Note: I can provide examples for the animations for many of these should look like, having physically done many of them using Neolithic equipment. Just let me know.

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#3

Please add animations. That seriously makes a difference for a lot of us here. One of the animations that I really did enjoy was in Civ 6 when you build wonders, it shows a time lapse of the construction. I hope that some form of construction time lapse would appear in the games, not in fast forward speed, but in actual game time.

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#4

When I look at the level of detail of the landscapes, I am sure, that our developers will make just as high demands there. :wink:

#5

I agree. Animations make it more alive, make it more human. With buildings animations i like to watch it being build, make me more connected to the game. It give me a feeling it is a real progress of your tribe/village/city.
And i agree with tschuschi. I willing to wait longer if the developers are willing to perfect it.

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#6

Maybe I am too attached to old school games. When I read “animations make it more alive” I can’t disagree, but to myself I instantly think : what really makes a game alive for me is not the quality of its graphics but the quality of the stories and characters.

I really hope the villagers (/tribesmen/citizens whatever) won’t just be peons like in an rts. I read here and there about individual stats for characters, and I really hope they’ll go enough in depth there for the guys to have some sort of personnality. I don’t know how the scale of the game will work, I’d love to be able to see a character grow from birth to death, going through learning, marrying, having kids…

And what if the individual characters’ strength gave your city its identity. What if you get an exceptionnal fisher let’s say. He’d be able to teach his skills to the next generation. You could become a huge fishing town, and later on become a great port, be incredible sailors and as such big merchants. Or you could have a talented potter instead.

Sorry I might have strayed away from the topic. TL;DR : My immersion doesn’t require insane animations (the game looks gorgeous from the screens we see) it requires in depth gameplay.

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#7

mmh … I did not think about the danger of a longer waiting time.
The beta should appear soon, we are impatient, right? :wink:
My confidence in developers is that we will be pleasantly surprised at this stage. There will certainly be plenty of time left for the “fine-tuning” and we can offer better support with our ideas.

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#8

ofcourse i’m impatient. :star_struck: Look at the screenshots… :star_struck:

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#9

It would be pretty amazing to be able to select villagers to create a building and a series of animations of them building and passing building materials to one another while you see the progress of the construction generate before your eyes.

Not sure how that would work if it was interrupted by animals or enemies, perhaps if one of those variables goes within a certain distance then villagers automatically stop building in time for an animation to set of them climbing off their construction for you to send them to safety. Not sure in general if any of this is even plausible for this game. I also wonder how combat animations would work in this game when tribes fight each other or with animals?

In any case it’s not exactly a deal breaker if the game doesn’t feature heavily on this. I’m sure there would be other aspects to this game that would be more than enough to make up for it.

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#10

Hi there.

Animations are costly to do -well- and good animations requiere an experienced and talented animator.
At this moment animations are being made by me, so to expect hundreds of detailed animations for the beta, or the first release, is just not realistic. Not only because animating is not my strong point, but because animating is currently just one of the many work I have to do.

What we are working on -to be improved in the future- is an animation system that allows to introduce animations -including variety- related to tasks, items or tools, that can default to generic animations were specific ones does not exist. As with many other game features we are working hard in the core stuff that allows to add content fast and easy enough when/if we reach a point were we can hire the manpower to create it.

You can expect tons of generic animations for the first beta/release that will be replaced later with nice specific animations as soon as we can hire a good animator. We are already looking for one.

To resume: The game engine allows to define specific animations for tasks, items or tools, including variety for the same animation definition, but we have not yet the manpower to make the system shine.

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#11

You will manage that. More important is the beta, so we get an idea of the flow of the game :+1:

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#12

Sounds great :slight_smile:

#13

I am new! :smiley: and like to ask how about instead of the hundreds of animation why not base it on physics? Will this be even more complicated? Just thought it could be useful? Sorry to suggest anything silly or just over complicated. But since this is the first game that has good simulation perhaps this feature could make it in the future? :slight_smile: The game will go through the roof when it comes out cause it would be so popular! :wink: Gamers are wanting these type of complex games! To see an animal really breathing cause of the body simulation is what I am dreaming. Not too over complex but these little things and perhaps you don’t need to animate it all cause the simulation will do it. :slight_smile:

There are games that are very popular with being a simulation game but none have simulated the physics of living things. Simulate the ground and other things but not bodies.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Animation/PhysicallyDrivenAnimation

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#14

As the second link you post mention physics based animation can be the future, but sure its not yet the present but for games that use very limited number of characters in screen, like some fps out there.

In AC it is just not possible because the large number of characters. This type of games need to solve animation with technical tricks to make animating large numbers of characters possible, and it is only viable with pre-calculated animations. We are making the effort to at least mix those animations to make smooth transitions from one to another instead the hard switch usually present in this kind of games.

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#15

I totally agree. Animations is the most important core of the game. It makes the player connected. I’d prefer a better population game focus than a building game one.

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#16

Physics laws are ugly trust me… Some simulations use a huge amount of CPU and a night of computation (maybe more…). The problem is that some physics equations do not have explicit solutions (like Navier Stoke) hence you have to cut your all system into tiny pieces and calculate an approximation of the solution on each one of them. Even if you simplify it, it is just too big for a standard PC.
Pre-calculated animation is the best solution so far for cities builder games.

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#17

That’s where splines and limited regression come in. It’s often best to make a equation that is simple it arrives at a similar range. When writing software to calculate absorbed dose an object’s from a radioactive source, I typically substitute complex objects for primitive objects to simplify the math, unless extremely high detail is required.

Limited, simplified equations, which mirror the real ones, also tend to be less susceptible to going out of expected range, such as producing a bunch of infinity solutions or undefineds.

#18

Another Haiti trick is 2 take large equations and break them into Parts, allocating several threads for concurrent processing. Of course this will follow amdahl’s law. I do this whenever I have a large data set that requires time-consuming calculation

Find all primes from 0 to n?

Example
1 cpu with 8 cores, hyper threaded… So 16-1 threads (always use one less than max). Divide work considering d[Proceestime]/dn, so for each thread you spin up, give it less work to do as the numbers that it’s working with will be higher, and require a longer time to finish.
You can further optimize the equation using a Big O analysis to look for any bottlenecks.

IMG_8crb0n
IMG_8crb0n.jpg2490×1846 1.54 MB

And if you get really bored writing game animations, you can always tag public boards with tiny assembly programs lol this one finds the numbers that are prime from 1 to 100, though it does it any single thread without any cool optimizations lol

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#19

Cool!!!

#20

Your damn right. I hope AC does the animation extremely well.

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