The Alpha Commander

I really don't like the highlight gradient and such on the edges of the commander's shoulderpads so to speak. No other buildings to my knowledge have highlights, they're all solid colours, and it makes it look really odd and out of place.

Just my two cents.

I just want the A

I'm really surprised that this thread has 17 pages of nitpicking one of the HUNDRED different commander designs

I don't think you will be able to get these commanders when this game is released. At least that is what I think since we participated in Alpha and it's the Alpha commander.

Considering that we might be able to affect a change in the entire way Commanders are modeled and animated the "nitpicking", as you call it, may well be worth the effort.

Not to mention that this not only affects the 100 commanders planned but also any custom modding done to them.

In the end tho, i think Uber is very much in the stage of figuring out just how much flexibility these rigs require. I doubt they'd risk making 100 commanders and figuring out at nr 56 that the commanders look too much alike and that the rig needs change.

Then I'd say you missed the entirety of our concerns.

Obviously many of us really liked the Alpha Concept and would love to see something more closely related to the Concept, but in reality it's not the CORE issue.

The Core issue at hand is that the Rig system severely impacts Commander design, as Garat Mentioned several times I am right in the notion that the changes are due to the Rig system, so we took our very unique Alpha Concept and homogenized it to a 'template' with very little of what made it unique surviving that process, a Good example being the Gun and Lathe Arms. What happens when you have OTHER commander designs that don't neatly fit into the template? What about the Progenitor? The Theta? What about all the 1K backers? Yes the Rig system helps streamline the process and makes them easier to create, but based on what we've seen so far the cost to streamline is the loss of distinction, everything will just be shallow distinctions of the same thing. Fake Variety really.

Mike

"A" = Awesome! Gotta have the "A"

I mean what about quadruped commanders, or floating commanders, or really any commander that isn't two legs and two arms. The rig is very strict and not flexible; as it really only allows a bipedal human like commander.

Well they do have(as far as we know) 4 different rigs(with the potential for more later) as I showed potentially here, but it doesn't really change the root issue.

Mike

Is someone capable of decompiling the original animations so we can see how they actually work?

Because it really feels like the rig isn't hierarchical which would explain all the issues (and is a major design flaw in my understanding, at least for rigs which are supposed to be used for multiple units!).

It's completely legit to use a flat rig (or to compile a hierarchical into a flat one for the animation) when performance is a concern and you are going to have many instances.

But eliminating the option to parametrize the rig when dealing with custom commanders?
I fully understand why you did choose this animation format for regular units, at least internally.

What I DON'T unterstand, is why you had to use flat rigs when STORING the animation. Decoupling unit specific offsets and the actual animation and "compiling" them together during load time wouldn't have had any impact on performance, but it would have saved you the recent trouble.
Actually, this should be still doable right now, without causing to much of a regression. "Just" eliminate the translation component from the animation where no actual translation is required (like recoil) and add joint offsets to the model. Recompiling the final animation from the hierarchical skeleton and the rotational component (as well as real translations) from the current animation should be a breeze.

This would also save a lot of work on other units, I will just assume that even most of the regular bots and verhicles would be able to use THE SAME animations if only the offsets were stored separately.

You'd only gain flexibility, but the performance would stay just the same (except for load time).

It would even improve mod-ability, as modifications on unit models would no longer break animations (except for some minor clipping issues in extreme cases). Just don't store the compiled result, if it isn't really necessary.

a lot was said page 2 and i agree with it, but i'd still like to add my opinion. the differences are very minor, but what's mostly bugging me is the orientation of the chest.

in the sketch, it feels slightly rotated backwards which makes the two things on top of its chest look like anti air missile racks, while in the 3D model it feels ground-oriented.
actually, we can almost see those missile racks as some sort of weird "head" which would make the red light feel like being just a "on line" LED.

i'd say, make the missiles racks (or is that vents ?) less prominent, rotate the torso slighlty backwards and make it bit higher so its just a bit higher than the shoulders and it should do the trick. maybe.

and it definitely lacks the A for Alpha

The alpha commander reflects the state of the game perfectly:
-blocky, unfinished look
-arms copy-pasted from the earlier model
-ready to crash from the lightest breeze

I hope they give it an idle animation where it falls over for no reason and restarts.

You do know what alphas are like right?

I really wish I'd had the money for a custom commander it'd be a 8 legged shiva model with one hand holding bacon

Is there any recent word from the devs about this?

The silence is deafening

Sorry guys! ;p I've been meaning to finish the Lathe Arm on my Alpha but I've been pretty busy, got some good family visiting and to boot my keyboard just got FUBAR'd on my desktop so I gotta replace it to boot! xD

Mike

Alright, I finally got off my bot and did a first pass on the Lathe arm;



It's got a few differences from teh Concept, but I liked how some elements turned out for my LEGO Alpha Commander so I incorporated them here as well.

Mike

*stares at Mike*

Remove the shield on the lathe and then we can talk.