Status Report 24 October 2017

[DMentMan 707]

Great stuff!

[exacomvm 101]

No offense, but from what i've seen in the past few months and this status report, seems like developers are doing nothing.
Okay coding is hard and tricky i get it, but implementing these new weapon anims for such team should be few days work max, but for some reason its taking ages, if "you're busy" with more important things, just hire some freelance animator and he will do all guns in day or two.
Also for SFX its not a big deal too, probs the easiest thing in game development ( just requires hi-end gear for sure that u had forever ).

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by exacomvm

[Sqeezorz 839]

@exacomvm I think the Devs are not with Code yet so far, they can simply copy / paste weapons paste and make fine grinding.
The car needs strength until it gets in momentum.

 They can not look at w3: Armaholics a few tips and ask friends .... they create what is later filled with tips in the Scene.

[exacomvm 101]

18 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

@exacomvm I think the Devs are not with Code yet so far, they can simply copy / paste weapons paste and make fine grinding.
The car needs strength until it gets in momentum.

 They can not look at w3: Armaholics a few tips and ask friends .... they create what is later filled with tips in the Scene.

That makes no sense tbh. Do you even know how game development works?

[Sqeezorz 839]

No game development, only development of machines for the packaging industry, and there it is, if you do something new that no one has done yet, then it will be hard to ask for advice and answer.

[exacomvm 101]

1 hour ago, Sqeezorz said:

if you do something new that no one has done yet, then it will be hard to ask for advice and answer.

"it will be hard to ask for advice and answer."
Professionals simply don't ask for advice - That's where creativity shines and that's overall how great engines comes to life.

What exactly?
Making the best engine ever especially when best developers left Bohemia and only newbs left is indeed a tough task. But there's alot of small things such as animations and soundfx that can be done very quickly, but even these aren't done in like 2 months. 
If they can't make animations+soundfx+remastered textures for weapons in 1-2months then we gonna see DayZ beta in approximately 2022. Team of 30+ members can't do a simple job that usually is given to a single person to do in a week or something.

Edited October 27, 2017 by exacomvm

[Sqeezorz 839]

nobody prevents you from traveling to the Czech Republic and showing the team of DayZ how to do it right, do it if you can.

[exacomvm 101]

21 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

nobody prevents you from traveling to the Czech Republic and showing the team of DayZ how to do it right, do it if you can.

Even that is nearly impossible. In first place they should hire me and then give me an Supervisor status or something close to that.
Even highly talented artists can't achieve this level so easily.

Edited October 27, 2017 by exacomvm

[philippj 103]

-

Edited February 25, 2018 by .freaK

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

3 hours ago, exacomvm said:

No offense, but from what i've seen in the past few months and this status report, seems like developers are doing nothing.
Okay coding is hard and tricky i get it, but implementing these new weapon anims for such team should be few days work max, but for some reason its taking ages, if "you're busy" with more important things, just hire some freelance animator and he will do all guns in day or two.
Also for SFX its not a big deal too, probs the easiest thing in game development ( just requires hi-end gear for sure that u had forever ).

What experience/knowledge do you base your assertion on, or do you just like trolling as an armchair dev?

Edited October 27, 2017 by Dancing.Russian.Man

[exacomvm 101]

1 hour ago, .freaK said:

You know that time span is total BS, right? Also, a team doesn't consist of just designers. So please go ahead, prove your point, where is this magical person who can go through every asset of a dayz sized game and get it working in a totally different engine within a "week or something".

Just forget i've even wrote something here. " where is this magical person who can go through every asset of a dayz sized game and get it working in a totally different engine within a "week or something" just proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
A person can animate stuff etc, or make sfx for it, but it's up to coder to make it all work and trust me it's pretty easy.

 

1 hour ago, Dancing.Russian.Man said:

What experience/knowledge do you base your assertion on, or do you just like trolling as an armchair dev?

Well it depends on a team ofcourse, but usually shit like animations or sfx should not take long time, if someone told me to do 6 weapons in 2days for 300$ i could easily animate them even if i was lacking some skill, i think extra day would be enough to go through trial and error and finish the job as quality output.
I made this with pretty much 0 animating skills in like 1hour ( running, aiming etc ):

 

Edited October 28, 2017 by exacomvm

[DannyDog 532]

@exacomvm I see where you're coming from, but i bet you've never worked on animations for a still developing engine. Let alone have any experience working on a video game the size of dayz.

Not trying to sound rude but you try to compare yourself to video game animators when all you make are 20 second "sfm" videos on youtube.

Edited October 28, 2017 by DannyDog

[Troll_Hunter 54]

7 hours ago, exacomvm said:

Just forget i've even wrote something here. " where is this magical person who can go through every asset of a dayz sized game and get it working in a totally different engine within a "week or something" just proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
A person can animate stuff etc, or make sfx for it, but it's up to coder to make it all work and trust me it's pretty easy.

 

Well it depends on a team ofcourse, but usually shit like animations or sfx should not take long time, if someone told me to do 6 weapons in 2days for 300$ i could easily animate them even if i was lacking some skill, i think extra day would be enough to go through trial and error and finish the job as quality output.
I made this with pretty much 0 animating skills in like 1hour ( running, aiming etc ):

 

According to the team, Modding will be allowed with 0.63 beta I believe. Love to see your skills in there!

Aside from your skills I think I would not hire you because of your attitude. If you are skilled and this stuff is easy for you to do you could be successful if you present yourself more supporting and encouraging. I think the BI engine has a lot of unique features and (complex) ways to do them. I think you should investigate more before you pass judgement. What skills and experience do you have?

[exacomvm 101]

6 hours ago, DannyDog said:

@exacomvm I see where you're coming from, but i bet you've never worked on animations for a still developing engine. Let alone have any experience working on a video game the size of dayz.

Not trying to sound rude but you try to compare yourself to video game animators when all you make are 20 second "sfm" videos on youtube.

Well i get what you mean, but animating for SFM and for a Game Engine is barely a different thing. Game Animators even have some fancy rigs made for themselves which makes the animating even easier than for a std "SFM" guy.
But animating for a game is alot more responsibility and the quality must be great ofcourse, you can't just make something "random" as video editors do.
Nowadays SFM isn't even a thing in eSports movie making, they now started using actual Game Engines.. since it saves the rendering times alot compared to normal renderers. Also usually animations are made outside of the game engine, they just getting imported to an game engine.

Oh and i do not try to compare myself to anything, im not even animator. I just know things haha.

Here's an example ( UE4 ): 

And here is one that was made completely manually and rendered in 3D Application, ~8months of work  ( Octane Render with Maya or something ):

@Troll_Hunter

Fair point, sometimes i just get cocky as we all do, I am not Animator, i just mostly do Look-Dev & modelling related stuff as hobby or freelance job, sometimes some video editing too ( started as editor, became CG Artist ).
I would not even consider myself a "Good" artist, still alot to learn.
Here's something i currently work on ( test renders that turned out pretty good ): https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v8G1d
Unfortunately i do not have something cool to show that was final job, i focus more on learning and playing around rather than doing some production quality stuff ( damn perfectionism ).
Not so long ago started using Octane Render, did few tests:

 

Check desc for some screens.

Edit: Not sure how hard the moding gonna be ( like importing new stuff etc ), but i gonna consider making a weapon or two for DayZ including some anims+technical specs, that should be a good taste of the tip of iceberg of what DayZ devs dealing with right now.
Even if nobody is going to use it, it should be fun to see it ingame on private server or something.

Edited October 28, 2017 by exacomvm

[Nebulae3 422]

I admit I`m excited for 0.63 beta now on our experimental branch servers. It will bring many old players back - so you need a lot of servers for such an event. Good read and happy Halloween! 

Edited October 28, 2017 by Nebulae3

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

7 hours ago, exacomvm said:

-snip for length-

I still disagree with you saying that creating (mocap and by-hand, we know the devs do both) and implementing dozens of animations for each weapon (not to mention literally everything that also needs to be animated) is something that can be just "done in a couple days/weeks." And I believe there is a difference that can't be ignored between "movie animations" and ones intended for live gameplay.

Edited October 28, 2017 by Dancing.Russian.Man

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

Each gun has more unique animations than any game I'm aware of.

This alone makes the job unusually time intensive.

Edited October 28, 2017 by ☣BioHaze☣

[exacomvm 101]

55 minutes ago, Dancing.Russian.Man said:

I still disagree with you saying that creating (mocap and by-hand, we know the devs do both) and implementing dozens of animations for each weapon (not to mention literally everything that also needs to be animated) is something that can be just "done in a couple days/weeks." And I believe there is a difference that can't be ignored between "movie animations" and ones intended for live gameplay.

Yeah gotta agree and also disagree to my previous posts, exaggerated it a bit, but also weapon animations is pretty short sequences atleast these first person ones, but in DayZ its full body animations with reloading/running etc ofcourse is way harder to make these and merge with mocaps.
Typical game has like Hands+Gun and animations such as fire, reload and draw and that's it.
Dayz has like: Full Body + Weapon ( fire, raised, lowered, reload, chamber, raised running, lowered running, raised walk, lowered walk )

Also i think it highly depends on the artist too and how much of scripts/shortcuts he has and learned for animating.
 

Edited October 28, 2017 by exacomvm

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

25 minutes ago, exacomvm said:

Dayz has like: Full Body + Weapon ( fire, raised, lowered, reload, chamber, raised running, lowered running, raised walk, lowered walk )

I think it's WAY more than that too. They gave the number of unique anims per gun recently, I think it was over 50....

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

20 minutes ago, ☣BioHaze☣ said:

I think it's WAY more than that too. They gave the number of unique anims per gun recently, I think it was over 50....

"The FNX has 28 individual animations," according to this SR.

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

Just now, Dancing.Russian.Man said:

"The FNX has 28 individual animations," according to this SR.

Oops, there you go, thanks!

[Sqeezorz 839]

Also do not forget: every action can be aborted to switch to another action. Exactly this point makes the whole animation system a challenge, so it does not look "amateurish". The animations need "exit points" and "entry points" to handle that, and I think that's pure "manual work".

[exacomvm 101]

13 hours ago, Sqeezorz said:

Also do not forget: every action can be aborted to switch to another action. Exactly this point makes the whole animation system a challenge, so it does not look "amateurish". The animations need "exit points" and "entry points" to handle that, and I think that's pure "manual work".

These are sequences imo, i think the real challenge there is for the coders, not animators, but even coding it should not be very difficult since the coder most likely very good at it and can add it pretty fast. Also i doubt that Bohemia had to redo this system, old ones should work just fine.
For example CS:GO has tons of 1-3sec animations that blends into various actions during gameplay. For example if you run and look up/down then animation A, B and C blends automatically. I guess every game uses this cause it just saves alot of time and overall is better technique rather than do separate anims for every possible action.

Actually it would be interesting if devs could add some screens or even "timelapses" of making some stuff something like that: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZnyigB4OHk

 

Edited October 29, 2017 by exacomvm

[Sqeezorz 839]

13 minutes ago, exacomvm said:

These are sequences imo, i think the real challenge there is for the coders, not animators..............snip.

To my honest answer: I do not know. I can imagine the planning and work processes, from the real implementation (programming / code on PC-base) I have no expertise. That's why I stop my answers.

[DannyDog 532]

1 hour ago, exacomvm said:

These are sequences imo, i think the real challenge there is for the coders, not animators, but even coding it should not be very difficult since the coder most likely very good at it and can add it pretty fast. Also i doubt that Bohemia had to redo this system, old ones should work just fine.

No, one of the main systems they have been rewriting since last year IS the animation system. If you search back to previous status reports and a couple of dev blogs they've stated that their old anim system lacked the ability to properly play anims and have them blended together with others. Like the janky jogging while lighting a flare. Not to mention having it all integrated and run by their new enscript system and not engine functions. I suggest doing a bit more research on what the dayz devs are working on to better grasp the scale and difficulty of what they are currently trying to achieve rather than to assume their process is similar to other animation systems and engines.