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How about adding a height slider, but locking it with a cheat?
Mistermooman
Posts: 265 New Member
How about adding an extra slider for height that can't be used unless a cheat code like "UlockHeightSlider on" or something is entered. Since it's hidden with a cheat, the user will understand and agree that it's not meant to be part of the main game, and they will accept that it will look bad when animated. And it won't affect reviews or anything since it's hidden.
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But if you mean to distort the character like in TS2 cheat then...whatever, but use it at own risk..since the animations dont work porpelly just like in TS3 Mod.
What would be the point? Its not a good idea for them to include height sliders, period, unless they can fix it so the animations look right between two different sims who are the same age, but are also widely different heights. They also shouldn't set it up so we have to have to use cheat codes to access the height slider, if they are going to include it. But again, if they do, they have to make all the animations work correctly when a short and a tall sim interect. Otherwise I'm going to end up downloading sims that are shorter or taller than normal, and it won't look right when interact. I often have trouble telling the difference between adult and teen sims as it is.
Sorry, Too bad, because unlike you, most people would care. I also don't want to accidentally download sims that are shorter or taller than normal, unless the animations work right, so I'd really hope they wouldn't do what you suggested.
So you just can select one of the tree heights for your adult/young adult. This way EA only has to make 3 animations for every object because there are 3 heights..
This would be a nice compromise.
That would be the most practical way to do it, but the number of animations would still add up really fast. They would still have to practically triple the number of animations in the game for each of the three different heights to animate correctly. Even that might not be practical enough at the moment. Maybe with some better technology, EA could make the Sims animations auto correct themselves for the different heights, but as far as I know that technology doesn't exist yet, and they might have trouble creating it.
While it will triple the amount of animations, it won't triple the amount of work. In the same way the weight of a character changes, the height can too, and the animations will have minimal modifications. Does a short person scratch their *** any differently to a tall person? No, provided the proportions of the limbs are the same. It's just a scale. It really couldn't be that hard to do, as far as I can tell.
FIFA is a good example - before kick-off and after the end of the match, you can see players shaking hands with the referee/linesmen. The thing is, these players are often of different heights - but they are not individually animated - they universally use a single animation.
The Sims 3 is just a completely different system of animation. There's no physics, etc.
Preset heights would more than triple the amount of animations; animations with objects would be tripled, but they'd have to create 6 versions of every animation between Sims, one for each height combination. Then, with TS4 group mechanics, there would be even more extra animations; if Sims look in a group actually look at the Sim who is talking, rather than just animatong Sims heads rotating, they'd have to animate them rotating and lifting or bowing, and, again, they'd have to do it for each height combo.
All that, and presets are still the easiest way... I don't even want to think about the work that would go into a slider.
Some games other than a sports game - ie RPGs, allow you to specify the height of your character. These characters can do many things - sit down, pick something up, eat something - carry out an action that others can ie play a musical instrument, etc.
I'm just saying it doesn't necessarily mean more individual animations based on height.
Before a match starts, they walk to the field and undergo formalities for an example they sing their anthems then they shake hands or do some workouts; and after the game, they celebrate or talk and greet the referees - basically like in real life. :-)
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How can they animate the interactions between players, if their height is different? If 160cm and 185cm players shake their hands or have a conversation, the animation still looks correct. I always wondered this.
It's completely different from animating interactions between Sims; though the animations themselves are premade, it's not a video clip that's compiled during development, it's a set of animations, and the game "calls up", so to speak, the correct animations to display when they're needed. A single movement can be made up of several individual animations, that are strung together on the spot to make one natural movement.
You know the 3d position of a person's hand - you know the position in 3d space of another person's hand - you move them together - the joints pull the forearm and upper arm accordingly (based on constraints of the joints). Theoretically, you can do it purely in code - in the same way you could turn a Sim's head in code - outside of animation.
In fact, I think Sims can look at things outside of animation (ie a toddler on the floor) - in the same way that Alyx could look at you in Half-Life - or in other games whereby your character can move and NPC's heads can follow you - this is not animation, this is real-time.
Your character can crouch down or climb and they will keep their heads pointing at you. Most people have probably seen that in a computer game; however, in the same way, instead of looking at you, you could make the NPC point at you (arm outstretched) and continue to point at you as you move - again, it is not animation as such.
Half-life 3 on the other hand has major problems with doing this with the motion capture route that they went down. Such a simple method in Half life 2 effectively broken by motion capture - broken by an advancement in 3D animation.
What Plopppo is saying is that if an alternate method of generating animations was used (like skeletal or procedural animation) it could be possible to have differing heights.
Obviously you'd need people skilled in these techniques and outside of big workstations / render farms it may not look good enough for gaming yet. So EA use hand tuned animations with some automation to keep things simple and looking good on many different specs of PC. This approach does mean that you have limitations, like heights, but can have more complex interactions with objects.
So it's possible, but maybe not practical at the moment.
Well, I guess you're right on the downloading part. I hope they at least can do a stretch skeleton kinda thing, maybe keep it in the save file so it doesn't affect uploaded Sims.
Preset heights could be done, but they would have to sacrifice a lot of resources to do them properly, which means other areas of the game would be less developed or in-depth, and would be lacking. If it's a choice between having Sims of different heights or fully developed gameplay, the latter option wins for me, hands down.
Rather than the devs simply saying that height won't be included this time around, I wish they would explain it as you have. If they explained to the players WHY it can't be included, perhaps people would finally understand.
I'm happy for them to bypass different heights if it means they get to focus on other aspects of gameplay.