Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replaced ragdoll physics but wasn’t used during most character movement behaviors.
The developer did a presentation at GDC 2014 on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE
And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.
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.
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...
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.
yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.
I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.
A great tennis drill is when your coach hits the ball to you and randomly yells "LEFT!" "RIGHT!" or "MIDDLE!" after you've begun your swing. Then you have to hit the ball in that direction. Helps hone your reaction time and helps you to have a "neutral" swing that doesn't telegraph your intentions to an opponent.
One can imagine variations in many sports.
Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.
Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.
Controllers use analog input for the sticks. I guess you could create a system which uses a dead zone where the player "signals" their intention by partially moving the stick in their desired direction.
This would be incredibly cumbersome though, and the payoff would not be worth it.
Your brain is hiding a lot from you.
An interesting personal anecdote I have:
I damaged my back with bulging disc, which caused horrific sciatica nerve pain.
When I was able to walk again, I had some nerve damage.
This meant I had lag in my left leg!
I’d tell the leg to move instinctively when walking and there would be a delay. The entire walking movement of the leg was present, but just with a noticeable lag!
It was weird!
Eventually it healed fully, or I adjusted. Not sure which! :-)
I had a couple of MRIs to see what was going on.
Essentially I’ve got degenerative disc disease.
My specialist was the head of the Spinal Care unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
So I trusted his advice.
He said that surgery could very well make it worse, and that over time it would likely begin to heal itself.
I had a couple of steroid injections and took mild painkillers and anti inflammatories to manage the pain for a year or so.
The initial incident was well over five years ago.
Ive had reviews since, and the advice is still the same.
Surgery is a last resort. Just keep mobile and don’t do anything to make it worse.
The MRIs show that the disc that is jamming into my nerve has slowly begun to reduce.
So I force myself to remain mobile by continuing to walk everywhere, and have a standup desk for work as I literally couldn’t sit down for months!
I pretty much now never lift anything.
Your body cant process pain and motion at the same time. Which is a simplistic explanation. So walking is an excellent path to recovery.
Before the injury I’d back squat 130kilos, and strict press 95, could run a marathon and had a resting heart rate of 42bpm.
It flares up from time to time, and is never truely better.
I’m never pain free, I just learn to ignore the pain and keep moving!
I could talk for hours about my journey LOL
There you 'actively' walk and 'manually' keep balance. It's an interesting experience, but it makes walking a conscious act, it becomes something you do.
Arguably that is less realistic than just moving an analog stick, for most people walking is just telling your body to move in direction x.
Like those arcade shooters where you duck and lean to dodge bullets, or a full fledged whole-body VR setup on an infinite omni-directional treadmill.
You could instead have the button downpress "charge up" energy and then begin the jump when the button press ends, which would allow for more realism, but also introduce a delay.
I do too, but also think it greatly depends on the game. For example, Hollow Knight designed to have snappy response to player input from the start and I loved it. In RDR2, I find the floaty behaviour adds another layer of realism.
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 the body retroactively, while holding onto the ground.
A good example of this is Factorio's spidertron. When the spidertron moves, the legs follow with a walking motion that perfectly tracks the ground below. In this case, it's a great-looking tradeoff, probably because there are so many legs, and not much animation done to the body itself.
I guess it's all trade offs at the end of the day, dev effort vs game style vs priorities.
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.
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.
In GTA V characters have two different animation modes, the realistic one based on Euphoria when using the third-person camera and the "do what the darned keys are saying right now" when using first-person. Always seemed like a sensible compromise to me, though first-person movement is particularly snappy and direct, more so than pretty much any other FPS, which typically still have some inertia.
However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness.
Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead.
At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.
There are new approaches to generating realistic character motion being shown at SIGGRAPH every year, getting better and better, but the best ones are largely too expensive for games to adopt. Plus, for player-controlled characters, at a certain point you run into a fundamental tension between control responsiveness and physical realism of animations.
I recently saw a great article on the topic which even comes with a WebGL demo: https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacem...
Now of course you can go above and beyond that for more realistic motion and , but having worked in the space, I would Serguei that is also solved without requiring recent research. Most recent motion research is about novel motion generation but the general problem of dynamic adjustment to authored animation has been solved by several systems already. But just like my original comment, there’s both a development and runtime cost to all of this.
Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.