Feedback talk:User/SLAINE/Animation when character stops walking

Agreed. It's unrealistic to have a character stand absolutely stone-still when not running or walking. It's equally unrealistic to have them constantly sway (or wobble) when standing still. Some minor movement is realistic (e.g. shifting weight from one foot to another, looking around, a random gesture here and there, gaining balance in the transition between walking/running and coming to a standstill, etc.). But to be constantly swaying like a tree in a breeze looks silly.

I found this particulary annoying and distracting in the early cinematic conversations between the player's character and NPCs involved in moving the plot along. It's like they had ADD or something and couldn't stop twitching, shifting around, or moving their hands in gestures that had no connection to their conversation or the emotional state of their exchange. Fortunately, come to find out these were simply early place-holder animations per this blog entry on the official site. The cinematic conversations now look MUCH improved. I can only hope the same attention to detail will be paid to the player's character when standing still.

To make their standing still animation even more realistic, don't just throw in a random movement, gesture, or twitch in an attempt to make the character look more realistic by not standing absolutely still. Instead, marry those movements to the environment they're in. If the character comes to a standstill in a swamp teaming with flying insects, have the gesture they make be an attempt to swat the insects away from their face. If they're in a forest and a bird chirps off to the right of the screen, have the character's head turn to face the source of the sound. If they're standing still for a particularly long time, make them shift their weight from one foot to another in a gesture of obvious discomfort from standing in one place for too long. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 18:34, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Your last paragraph sounds a little unrealistic to me. Remember, we're talking about a state (standing still) that will account for a very low percentage of your active playing time. I wouldn't argue that this situation desperately needs sophisticated event-based animations -- at least not as long as there are plenty other things to do. I'm with you on the other points, though, feeling that some of the idle animations might be a bit overdone. Naum 23:36, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Agreed that's it not a high priority item. But it really shouldn't be that hard to code either. In all likelyhood there already exist several character animations that could easily pass for event-based animations. Then it's just a matter of programming some fairly simple logic. For example:

if(environment_sound == "bird_chirp_01.wav" && character_state == "standing_still")

{

character_head_animation = "turn_right";

}

That's over-simplified, but not by much. Anything to heighten the realism - especially in the small details - just makes a game shine all that much more. I'm not suggesting they devote major resources to this. But all of the elements for accomplishing it probably already exist. It's just a matter of marrying those elements together with a little programming logic as demonstrated above. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 23:55, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Doing a bit of programming myself from time to time (though nothing game-related), I can definitely say that it probably won't be that easy (otherwise they would have already done it). Whenever I encounter a problem and come up with a seemingly simple solution for it, I know that I just haven't thought enough about it to see the real difficulties (unless it's very trivial), and I would be surprised quite a lot if that was any different for highly complex programmes like game engines.

However, it's probably rather pointless to discuss this in a feedback section where we have next to no knowledge of the things we're discussing compared to those we're addressing, so I'd stop it here if you don't mind. Naum 14:32, 29 November 2011 (UTC)