The Alpha Commander

Sorry yes you are right. By impossible I meant impossible right now, for the exact reason you mentioned - lack of quantifiable data on the commanders various weights and dimensions!

At the moment it still feels logical for me, that the commanders arms should point forwards when he is idle.

You do make a very good point in your final section though, which I very much agree with. I think the commanders general animations in any other position than idle, (and I would be shocked if this was considered final by the dev team anyway) could do with attention going forwards!

And so now, we wait... for a Developer Response.

What can you tell us Garat?

From his bed at present? Probably not very much. but given how much you lot have been bickering it looks like they've a lot of reading to do when they get into the office! (in about 5 hours' time)

It's not that I don't like style, but in my mind I always refer to the "Metal Fatigue"-robots, which I think were the best robots in a RTS game. They had kind of had big legs and looked a lot like straight out of a manga

First time poster long time lurker.

I have to say i agree with Mike/Knight.

And I do have to say also that a lot more focus have to be put into the commanders differentiation. Make them as varied as in the concept art try to convey those attitudes and looks.

They seemed to be better fitted to concept in the first 3D models:

http://www.google.com/imgres?start=199& ... =252&ty=17


Look at the alpha in that picture inclined angles, wide chest llamative center eye.

Do our demands give them the time and money to do that though?

I'm afraid that we might be stuck with what we have now, given the financial and temporal constraints UberEnt and the Planetary Annihilation Team is working under.

We're in a no win situation... either the Commanders all get unique Rigs and Uber cuts other features... or we keep features in exchange for the Commanders looking very samey.

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Maybe these can be the "First Pass" Commanders, sharing Animations and Rigs... and slowly phase in new Commanders and New Animation Rigs for older Commanders as time goes on?

We're possibly in a no-win situation. No help being needlessly pessimistic.

Indeed, I got ahead of myself. Apologies.

I've been under the impression that the animation engine isn't even complete yet. If you recall the Delta Commander 'intro' video, there was a LOT of subtle animation / movement that was in the video and not in the game. This may be the reason why the Delta / Alpha look so incredibly stiff at the moment.

That's what I'm hoping at least.

Looking at the Rig, the Gun and Lathe Arm are fully rigged to function as we saw them in the Delta 'intro' video. Considering how they couldn't even do the wider shoulders of the Alpha, I fear we might be stuck with the same Gun and Lathe designs.

I was originally hoping that things like the little gun animations and such would be done separately from the 'core' animations, kinda like how you could in SupCom, so that you can have the 'extras' like the gun/Delta wings be handled separately from things like the Walk but it doesn't seem like that will be the case.

Mike

I understand that it needs more skeletons and rigging is a pain sometimes. But it is not organic rigging and cannot they just modify the animations from varied skeleton to varied skeleton?

If using the same skeleton for each commander degraded the Alpha Commander concept arm into what we have now then the situation is quite dire. I know if I paid $1000 for my own commander i would want my own skeleton or one that is close.

It's not Organic, but it still does use a full 'proper' rig and weighting from what I can tell.

It's unfortunate that the system is so rigid/exact that you can't have things like slightly wider shoulders and different Gun/Lathe Arms.

Mike

They should be able to do that Mike... I mean, even if they displace some of the bones, they should still animate correctly. Even if the hip spacing is changed, the animation should remain unmodified so long as the length of the Thigh and Foreleg remain at the same ratio, and the height of the hip off of the ground in relation to the overall length of the leg remains identical.

That's for walking animations of course, but KBots (which is what a Commander is) don't really have any other kinds of animations. There's a possible deploy animation, but that should be unique to each Commander, and it really isn't hard to make that animation unique.

That's what I was expecting, but given how they DIDN'T do that with a design that clearly should have different proportions it's pretty telling that they can't.

This is what I thought as well, but it's possible there's something we don't know yet that the root cause of all this.

Mike

Yeah knight, agreed the rig is going to affect the look of things - just pointing out that the unnaturally stiff, 90 degree arms & movement may be a result of an unfinished animation engine.

The rest, well, perhaps the rigging component isn't ready for any adjustments / differences yet.

They why bother doing an Alpha model to begin with? Based on Garat's replies it was known that the Current Rig forced changes in the Alpha's Design, if the system was being designed to handle the kinds of adjustments that the Alpha needed, why do it? why not do something new? We know they have other concepts beyond the Alpha, Delta, Theta and Progenitor.

We're all just pissing in the wind here until Uber gets back to us, but we can extrapolate a bit from what we know so far.

Mike

this is turning into a nasaspaceflight thread.

Wait, I think I've figured it out. I can't believe it took me this long to get it.

The Alpha is just new geometry layered on top of the Delta. Uber didn't want to make an entirely new unit because it would do the exact same thing, what with Commander abilities not being implemented yet, so they just reskinned the Delta.

I hope the geometry changes with time, as I doubt the Alpha is *supposed* to look like this.

Umm... wat?

Sorry, early in the morning. Uber just replaced the Delta's Geometry with the Alpha's, no changes to Unit ID or rig. Better?