honestly the more overtly breakable parts of the game are a big part of what make it endearing and it’d be pretty funny if they put all that money into e.g. glossing up the one giant spider boss only for no-one to notice because everyone just stays at the back of the cave to kill it with arrows while it’s still offscreen
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Just make a new fucking game. The thing I always loved about DeS was the gray hopelessness of the world. It flows out of everything. The environments, the low key score, the very subtle yet deliberate sound effects. I always thought this cover captured the essence of it so well:
The cover doesn’t convey extreme difficulty to me, it just conveys the general hopelessness that FROM managed to capture so well.
I guess we’re putting a can of Monster Energy Drink in that knight’s hand so he can Kool-Aid Man us into the 4k generation.
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One of the last things I did on the PSN web store before it changed over to the new implementation was buy Dark Souls for my PS3. I should hopefully give OG Demon’s Souls a try in the next few weeks. Pity it won’t have world tendency but I am ten years late.
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I can’t trust a remake that took the goofy horn out of the theme song.
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the spider-verse suit in miles morales actually lowers his framerate to be more movie accurate
https://twitter.com/HassanHamid26/status/1322167295897149440
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this looks great but as with the similar gimmick suits in the original it is very visually incoherent
also, why not make the whole game like this… it is clearly cooler
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It would get blasted for having a bad framerate.
That’s really, really cool though. It’s kind of amazing just how well they pulled it off.
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It looks like the lower frame rate is just on the character and not everything else though. Like the movement through the world still looks smooth if you’re not looking at Spider-Man. Likewise with the enemies he’s fighting. They look like they’re animating at whatever their normal frame rate is while Spider-Man is at the lower rate.
It’s a cool effect.
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That’s fine because the characters and the background animated at different speeds in the movie too.
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earnestly wondering if/how TV motion smoothing would mangle this
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the dynamic open world and reactive inhabitants of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales: the living room, the curtains slowly swaying in the gentle breeze of the electric air conditioning, the mixture of light and shadow on the floor and walls produced through the interaction of the sun, the glass windows and the outdoor foliage
the stylized visual elements of the “SPIDER-VERSE SUIT” unlockable/downloadable customization content: a seventh generation home video console’s game software being played on 36" TCL brand LCD television sitting on the floor
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Yeah, it’s incredibly important that the movement and camera still updates at full frame rate. This would look incredibly rough if they updated the rest of the logic at this framerate (and I’ve tried to make this work several times and it absolutely doesn’t).
This works because they’re holding on great, iconic keyframes – it’s animation fundamentals. Just like Guilty Gear, there aren’t shortcuts to this by cutting framerate, it relies on real, great animation. Really that extends to all 2D fighters – full-framerate camera movement and game logic, character animation rate based on traditional animation needs, variable per animation.
Insomniac already did a phenomenal job at key poses in the shipping Spider-Man game (looks like their GDC animation talk isn’t offered free, unfortunately), in contrast to the ‘all motion capture, all the time’ that way too many devs default to. Motion capture can get subtle shifts in weight but it’s awful at the posing that delivers style and personality. It’s anti-animation.
To put it another way, when experimenting with this variable frame-rate technique on 1s or 2s, we learned that mechanical objects moved mostly through physics and game logic can’t look animated, because they’re not. The hand-drawn FX they played on top (explosions, laser shots, impacts), though, absolutely needed to be held at quarter-rate or less in order to read correctly, because those carry a human hand selling all the potential energy they need.
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Guilty Gear Strive (the upcoming one) uses the same kind of tricks. On the other hand its predecessor Xrd (and DBFZ and Granblue VS) have the camera move at the same frame rate as the characters during super moves but everyone complained about the choppiness, and rightly so, especially since the standard fight camera always moves at full framerate.
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How many copies of The Animator’s Survival Kit does the average game development studio have on their bookshelf?
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oh I’m sure it’s under there somewhere, holding up a mocap room light
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the counterpoint to this is Overwatch, where things are very much classically animated but whoops if you run the game over 60 fps, you see the seams
turns out squash and stretch doesn’t work when you have all the frames
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Interesting, are there any reference videos of people noting this?
you can just jump into a game and look
it’s especially noticeable when Lucio or Widowmaker jump (Lucio’s wallriding and jumping often breaks the animation system and his midsection will stretch in plain view). smears and squash and stretch are trickery rooted in lower framerates but shove frames in-between keyframes and you can notice a lot
Blizzard’s animators have pointed out the techniques themselves with examples of McCree’s POTG intros (which are a little harder to suss out since anything not in-match has a 60/30 fps cap, depending on PC or console)
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The two GDC presentations where they talk about smears and squash and stretch are those two. But they themselves aren’t animating discrete poses like GG or Spiderverse, they animate with continuous movement in mind, they never mention framerate playing any role in their weird keys, so as far as I can understand it’s working as intended.
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yeah, OW lives in a weird place where they’re combining traditional animation techniques to imply quick movement with a genre that demands that everything be seen
the second it stops existing in a controlled environment, it breaks
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