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Elisea Renyven · **07-25-2013, 03:09 PM**

Hrmm. That'll be interesting. I really do like how much FF14 developers have put thought into emotes, the ability to interact with environments. It is really something that nearly no longer exists in the MMO world. Its a nice change. I missed it.

Averis · **07-25-2013, 03:23 PM**

This sounds interesting, but can be jarring if it's just mouth flaps with no body motion that goes with it. Humans don't usually keep their head perfectly still while talking. XD

I wish a game would take the idea of multi-character emotes from games like the Matrix Online where you could hug and such (course, with the other player's approval). I've never seen that done again since then. I guess, though, with all the different race sizes and height slider, that would be impossible for this game.

Nightsha · **07-25-2013, 03:56 PM**

Oooh, I really like this Big Grin

Â it adds a bit of depth imo. Also, I agree with Fiona on alternate sitting positions even if it just means being able toÂ use all race/gender sitting positions unrestricted. The more options the better.

Vokcas · **07-25-2013, 04:26 PM**

I am still on the fence about this one, I was like alot of you when I heard Swtor was adding voice acting to emotes and look how bland that turned out. I would love to have a natural talk feature which moves the mouth depending on your character mood and when the characters /s or /y.

FreelanceWizard · **07-25-2013, 04:58 PM**

They had talking emotes in Earth and Beyond, of all things, and they were really slick. The game actually scanned through your text and built up a phoneme list for what you were saying, then mapped those to an animation sequence -- so your character actually looked like they were actually saying the words. Then, it used punctuation to determine how animated you'd look while speaking. It was a surprisingly cool system that actually worked pretty well (and is similar to some work I did back in grad school on animated agents).

While I doubt we'll be getting that, just having characters move their mouths when speaking and look at their targets is pretty neat. The "look at your target" thing in particular makes the game feel more alive, I think.

Ildur · **07-25-2013, 05:01 PM**

Details like this make me go "SQUEEEE!" with joy.

Kyatai · **07-25-2013, 05:18 PM**

Very cool.
Wonder if they're taking a cue from the voice modulation etc that EQO is working on?

One concern though..
*faint grin*
Since this is a Japanese-created game... will the mouth movements 'fit' our words- or will this look like Godzilla? The mannerisms and emphasis placed on words is VERY different when you compare Japanese to English. Japanese are very expressive people.. hehe I giggle everytime I see the podcasts with Yoshi-P and his associate and watch their expressions and mannerisms.
(reminds me of when I lived in Okinawa... hehe)

One thing I've always been curious about: if a pre-existing game has aÂ certain tech that allows for certain things (aka multiple seating types, multiple emotes, the ability to do that 'speech pheromone' thing mentioned above...
Why can't later games access it too? And use it to make their game better?
Is it purely resource allocation?
Seems if its 'already been done' uploading the code would be... easier than recreating the wheel an plugging in your own emotes and so on...

That said, I'm not a computer program or game developer... so could be MUCH harder than it seems. Just something I wondered about....

FreelanceWizard · **07-25-2013, 05:23 PM**

Welp, licensing is one, and patents are another. (*shakes fist angrily*) There's also the short turnaround usually required in game development -- most shops have too much to do and too few people to do it, so cool stuff like this usually ends up by the wayside. The code usually can't just be copy-pasted for a lot of reasons; it ends up having to be reimplemented. For instance, the stuff I did was in C# and used Microsoft Agent. It wouldn't easily fit into a game like XIV that's written in C and uses DirectX, even if the underlying ideas could be reused.

But, honestly, software patents are a lot of the problem. Sad

Averis · **07-25-2013, 05:27 PM**

(07-25-2013, 05:18 PM)Kyatai Wrote: One thing I've always been curious about: if a pre-existing game has aÂ certain tech that allows for certain things (aka multiple seating types, multiple emotes, the ability to do that 'speech pheromone' thing mentioned above...
Why can't later games access it too? And use it to make their game better?
Is it purely resource allocation?
Seems if its 'already been done' uploading the code would be... easier than recreating the wheel an plugging in your own emotes and so on...

That said, I'm not a computer program or game developer... so could be MUCH harder than it seems. Just something I wondered about....

In the case of animation, each game usually uses their own skeleton setup, which can't be simply transferred. Same goes with animated faces since there are many ways to animate something like that (bones or morphs or both). On top of that each game creates their own functions and sub-systems to control certain aspects of the game. Those are usually pretty unique between games and studios. When you add all those variables to the mix, taking code for controlling animations from one game to the next would likely not work at all.

Lren · **07-25-2013, 05:29 PM**

(07-25-2013, 05:18 PM)Kyatai Wrote: One thing I've always been curious about: if a pre-existing game has aÂ certain tech that allows for certain things (aka multiple seating types, multiple emotes, the ability to do that 'speech pheromone' thing mentioned above...
Why can't later games access it too? And use it to make their game better?
Is it purely resource allocation?
Seems if its 'already been done' uploading the code would be... easier than recreating the wheel an plugging in your own emotes and so on...

That said, I'm not a computer program or game developer... so could be MUCH harder than it seems. Just something I wondered about....

Could be the difference in engines or perhaps even programming language that is used when creating the game. Thinking it is the different 'skeleton's' used to animate, which you'd have to do for all the skeleton's in the game. It's not so much a programming thing, as it is an animation one.Â

Anyways, on topic! Love seeing that this is being done!

EDIT: DAMMIT, AVERIS! BEAT ME TO IT! XD

Kyatai · **07-25-2013, 05:31 PM**

Ahh... well that would explain it.
Too bad though... can you imagine how awesome a game it would be if we could take all the great stuff from other games and cram it into one?
The developers and producers would make a mint.

But yeah... didn't think about patents. *grumble*
They are good to protect your interests... but bad when they stop progression! haha

Aulairet · **07-25-2013, 05:34 PM**

(07-25-2013, 03:09 PM)Elisea Renyven Wrote: Hrmm. That'll be interesting. I really do like how much FF14 developers have put thought into emotes, the ability to interact with environments. It is really something that nearly no longer exists in the MMO world. Its a nice change. I missed it.

This is like, exactly what I was going to say almost. SE is really putting some fun extras that they really don't have to, but make the game so much more. Especially for us RPers, very very cool! Thumbsup

Averis · **07-25-2013, 05:34 PM**

(07-25-2013, 05:29 PM)Lren Wrote: EDIT: DAMMIT, AVERIS! BEAT ME TO IT! XD

Hehe, I'm no game programmer, though I've dabbled a little, but I do know 3D animation, and even in that industry skeletons (rigs) from one project to the next can be vastly different. You would think since they are all human it would be pretty standardized, and while there are some standard rigs, everyone has their own ways of doing things and each project has its own requirements.

Ildur · **07-25-2013, 05:37 PM**

Even if someone 'did it before', you still have to adapt it to your current game/engine/programming language, and perhaps you'll run into technical difficulties that will render it impossible to do.

There's a lot of factors that could be the issue. Resource allocation is the most likely.Modern videogames eat a lot of computer resources to work, mostly on visuals. All those high-res textures take a lot of space and quite a lot of memory to load and show, not to mention all the shadow and light calculations, and a lot of other systems that need to be processed. I'm guessing doing a phenome system like the one FreelanceWizard mentions would, perhaps, not be that taxing to the system on its own. But you also have to consider that you can have many people in the screen talking at the same time, and for each text line you have to run the process and show the result.

In ARR, however, I think they wouldn't have much of a problem besides designing the whole system to work properly. They'd need a lot of animations to fit the words and the pauses, though, so it's hard to say. And while it looks like it should be a simple task...well, it isn't. That's the thing with programming: maybe that window with the 3D preview of your charcater that you can open and close in a second actually took a week of programming. Not because it's hard, perhaps, but because programmers run into problems, bugs and glitches all the time. Maybe the render window was rendering the wrong armor, or the wrong colors, or the wrong race, and they couldn't find the error until after a week.
Now imagine something as complex as a phenome system. It would take them a lot of time and a programmer that is stuck in such a complex system is a programmer that isn't programming other, probably more important gameplay things.

EDIT: Ninja'ed like, two times. I'm so slow and old and get out of my lawn!

Lren · **07-25-2013, 05:38 PM**

(07-25-2013, 05:31 PM)Kyatai Wrote: Ahh... well that would explain it.
Too bad though... can you imagine how awesome a game it would be if we could take all the great stuff from other games and cram it into one?
The developers and producers would make a mint.

But yeah... didn't think about patents. *grumble*
They are good to protect your interests... but bad when they stop progression! haha

It's wishful thinking, sadly.

You can occasionally 'leverage' code that has been written before, so long as credit is given and such. But when money gets involved, things are generally re-done as to make full profit and avoid all the plagiarism mess. That's not even mention what transferring a line of code from one language to another... That's a whole other mess! XDD

(07-25-2013, 05:34 PM)Averis Wrote:
(07-25-2013, 05:29 PM)Lren Wrote: EDIT: DAMMIT, AVERIS! BEAT ME TO IT! XD

Hehe, I'm no game programmer, though I've dabbled a little, but I do know 3D animation, and even in that industry skeletons (rigs) from one project to the next can be vastly different. You would think since they are all human it would be pretty standardized, and while there are some standard rigs, everyone has their own ways of doing things and each project has its own requirements.

I've seen some packages that come with a standard human rig. Would be nice to see more of that but then again, it can look different depending on what environment it's running in xD!

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So there's going to be talking emotes.

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes