How come we're still using the same primitive system of skeletal animations that we were using in the mid 90s when...

How come we're still using the same primitive system of skeletal animations that we were using in the mid 90s when every other technical aspect of videogames has developed at least somewhat?
Surfaces have tessellation, UV maps, etc, sound systems have EAX, AI has goal oriented agents, polygon counts has been a constant race upwards for better or worse, there's a new innovation in lighting engines every two weeks, post processing is the cesspit of ez cheap graphical effects to put on a console. Most of these aren't used in games for various reasons but hey they exist. What about animations? They look the same as they did in the 90s. The closest thing to innovation is motion capture, and that's innovation the same way the transition from cel to digital is, trading some of the artistic quality to make it cheaper, easier, and faster to produce.

Here is a picture of a skeletal animation to get your noggin jogging.

Video games are made by art college fag lords and you think they can properly utilize physics to realisticly present movement?

Inverse kinematics is standard now m8. Even fucking nintendo uses it in zelda.
What innovations are there to make in terms of animations in the first place?

I don't really know what you're complaining about. There have been advancements in animation.
Like you said, there's motion capture. There's animation interpolation to get two unrelated animations to blend in to one another. There's nothing stopping hand-made animation from being created.
Then there's procedural animation that works fine and there are learning algorithms that can teach skeletons and models of varying levels of craziness to walk and run and jump that should be applicable to games in a few years.
Not to mention ragdolls and shit with joints that prevent goofy hyper extension.
Also, physical models that are capable of latching on to other skeletons and manipulating them, like in one of the Source engine updates (HL2E1, I think?) and the tech shown off by LucasArts way back when that had intelligent skeletal animations where bodies would try to prevent themselves falling by grabbing at whatever they could and shit like that.
Animation has literally made advances in leaps in bounds.

I don't know, something. I want to end this age of clothes clipping through swords, of body parts sticking through world geometry, of feet sliding around on the ground as the character gets in position to start its animation. I want animations that are actually grounded in the scene they're playing in.
I didn't know inverse kinematics was standard now. The first game I saw it used in was grand theft auto 4 and I thought it was mind blowing, I haven't really seen anything that looks as natural since then.

Its possible right now but very expensive processing wise. Not worth it
already exists
already exists
has nothing to do with technology.

Unless your goal is some kind of stylized animation then I don't know why you wouldn't want to use mocap.

Incidentally going from cel to digital didn't just make everything faster but greatly expanded the range of things that could be done. Only hopeless nostalgiafags still think cels are better.

Actually 3D games in the late 90's used vertex animation. Quake 1, Unreal 1 and UT99 are using those animation methods. A few later or so the skeleton animation gets used instead, I do not know which of those games used the skeleton animation first.

fugg I meant to write a few years later.

Half-Life had skellington animation I think.

Digital is certainly a better medium overall (especially for the color and composite stages, holy shit), but the transition brought a huge amount of unwanted issues. Early resolutions were stupidly low, it's hard to get the "warmth" effect that cels are known for, some tricks you could do with cels (like pouring water over the shot or shining angled light through the back) take insane amounts of time to reproduce accurately, etc. The worst thing, though, is that everyone simultaneously forgot the principles of animation and every new series took a nosedive in quality for quite a while.

It could be compared to vinyl versus CDs: CDs are superior by every metric, but the studios mastering them suck shit and brickwall everything while the vinyl mastering guys use their fucking brains.

A muscle rig would be fucking sexy but it's far too resource intensive for vidya

Maybe if you have 2000 people on screen at the same time.

No they didn't, and most animation is pen and paper even to this day.

Or in, you know, a video-game

Care to name a few?
Most popular ones are all digitally animated.

To be clear, I'm talking about anime and assumed you were too. I don't know if American shows are mostly digitally animated or not. In Japan digital is still the minority.

I was referring mostly to American animation. The fuckup period for anime was much shorter, and quality's higher than it's ever been for full season series (not quite as wonderful as classic OVAs, though). Background art in particular is insanely high quality.

This is what I wanna see. I wonder if you could make it work by baking multiple maps for different animation cycles. Resources would probably inflate too much.

watch frozen… k a multimillion pixtar film using the latest tec. and it has clipping issues out the ass. hanz picking up the new Disney princess only to have his fingers tickle her kidneys.

you want to know why? because the rushed the film for a quick buck. to fix these issues there is really no other option than to just have more animators work on it. and in vida where you have animations stacking on top of each other? ether you have to make each "set" animations separately as in each weapon having its own animation set. or make animation modifiers for each weapon that would modify the base weapon animations to compensate for each weapons specific mesh. add this and make it play nice with each outfit. each shield. every other weapon that you can have in your off hand. suddenly all you work is cubed. and you cant half ass it or some fagot will bitch on a basket weaving board.

look at Dark souls. they have a shit ton of weapons for a game all with their own hit-boxes. and "move sets" now theses move sets and the idle animations that go with them (walk run for 2 handed 1handed) all fall into weapon classes. same shit with Zelda BOTW. so there are several animations for the ULTRA GREAT SWORDS that are all animated and there are some weapon attacks that only are used on some of the UGS's some have that rolling attack that makes it a thrust. astora's great sword breaks the UGS' mold and has thrust attack animations for the right trigger. and uses the charge weapon art. witch is borrowed from the CHARGE WEAPON ART ANIMATIONS. sometimes a weapon will have its own special snowflake animation attached to it but some 95% of the animations are recycled. because every weapon cant have its own animations, let alone every weapon with every armor set with every off handed choice.

Blending mocap and hand-keying like they do in uncharted is pretty much the best we're going to get for a while until muscle rigs are viable in real-time.
Maybe AI animation sims too, but it's too early to tell if those are going to yield anything significant.