I've got a question about game design, and I don't know if you faggots can help me or not. Not about Monster Hunter so much as it's about just game production in general.
In one of the /mhg/ threads someone said that the reason most of the new monsters in World follow the 'two legs, long neck, wings, tail' stereotype is because making up skeletons for animations is more time consuming (and costly) than texture work.
So my questions is basically just is this true and can anyone expand on this?
Don't they have a shitload of assets from the japanese MMO? I thought that's what they were using for a lot of it.
Think of it this way, a new skeleton means you have to do a completely new set of animations making sure clipping, motion, and the like seem natural.
Texture work is just slapping shit on and adjusting values, it takes much less time.
chinese MMO and yes
Yes it's true. Rigging skeletons and animating them is a lot more time-consuming than putting together a new mesh and texture.
Imagine a 2D game, and take a basic sprite. Say you want to make two more enemies. You could draw two brand new enemies from scratch with brand new frames of animation for every single frame. Or, you just change the colour orange to blue, and save it as a separate file, and then change the blue colour to green, and save that too. (In fact, old NES games didn't even save the different coloured enemies as different sprites, they just changed which colour palette was being used and it changed automatically).
But wouldn't they have to do independent animations for every monster?
And with how detailed textures are getting in modern games (in games like World anyway) it seems like that would take a lot longer.
Its kinda obvious that they tend to use the same skeletons because monsters in the series with the same body types tend to use the same exact kind of attacks.
Heres a few new monsters who pretty much have the Royal Ludroth skeleton, but with their own few gimmcky moves and abilities.
They take assets from the chinese mmo!?!?
Thats bullshit and I dont beleive it.
nope, you just have to adjust them. Also texturing is much easier than you think it is. especially when they're as undetailed as world. They're basically just swaps with minor variations.
It's where the bases for them come from. They adjust them based off that, but that's only because it uses the framework so it saved them some time
Taking assets from Online would only make sense. It was built in UR4 and looks pretty damn good. I said for years that a console or PC mainline MonHun would take little effort with the models and such already being done in Online. Considering Capcom was smart enough to contract in assets from the Chinese developers.
i'd assume the most time that goes into making a new monster is making the new gear and weapons for said monster.
also if they have monster skeletons that are similar to ones they had in prior games they can reuses animation pre sets.
I saw that fluffly bat use attacks that the quropeco had and i'd assume that 4 legged snake shares attacks with narga cougar and the red dog beast might have attack similar to zinogre
I've always wondered for games like Monster Hunter where you have TONS of armor and weapon models if they spend more time on design art or just the actual 3D modeling.
Yes, Rigging and making sure is broken in the animations are extremely more time consuming than just making textures
Not that making textures are easy, it's just that is a older art and have more tools to automate it more.
Rigging is not that old yet and automation is still not fail-safe, animation is also a lot more open-ended in the sense that there is so many options in animating something, that making a algorithm to help with that is very difficult so a lot of it is manual work.
making sure nothing is broken in the animations*
Nah, just stick with Yoda speak.
Its no wonder they manage to make this game in only 2 1/2 years. Im not even mad about the lack of that much large monsters. I'm just impressed they managed to do so much in such short time,especially for a MH game.
They didn't do much though, they just slapped a coat of paint on it. The monster interactivity got nerfed because they can now only interact with eachother during the turf war
As opposed to never really interacting at all? The most that existed was Quropeco calling other monsters Two monsters happening to be in the same zone and attacking you at once isn't interaction. That's just them following their normal programming and just being in close proximity while doing it.
They'll fight a little bit with normal moves after a turf war, but it's kinda clunky and they don't actually make contact a whole lot due to size and measures to prevent clipping.
This.
I feel like it was just something else for people to bitch about, but it's whatever. I don't want to bring that flame war up here again. It'll all be fine once the next game gets announced (I was here when Generations got announced, and it was literally the exact same thing of people trying to act like purist and that any kind of change was total trash)
they can't damage eachother either during that time.
no I mean they literally can't hurt eachother during a non turf war hit. it's a net decrease between them
That's disappointing, if true, but it was barely a factor in the prior games. Saying that, the slight amounts of damage they accidentally did to each other in earlier games getting exchanged for one or two instances of deliberate large amounts of damage in World, is a nerf, sounds a bit like making a mountain out of a molehill. You should be less complaining that it's somehow less interaction and more complaining that it simply makes hunts easier with no cost to the player.
Monsters could hurt each other in previous games why cant they do that outside of turf wars in this one? I actually remember seeing footage of a bunch of monsters fighting each other and a rathian managed to make a jyratodus topple by blasting it with a fireball, I never payed attention to the damage numbers though. It does look kinda sketchy whenever monsters try to bite each other though.
They just don't. Tested with the demo multiple times, outside of turf war monsters do 0 damage to eachother. Not even stagger
The embarrassing part of this is that it could and did happen in the games that released on decades old handhelds but here we are in current year plus 3 and we are moving backwards. While you faggots happily lap it up off the floor
Really? Are you checking by looking at damage numbers? I've seen gameplay where monsters would actually damage each other but no damage numbers would appear, let alone when other players but you damage the monster no numbers would appear. I think monsters only damaging each other with damage numbers visable only appear during turf wars and outside they may be able to hurt themselves just like the older games.
Or im just full of shit and they can actually stagger and "hurt" each other out side of turf wars without doing damage at all.
It's honestly this, because everything else shows damage even if it's not you causing it, so I have absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't be there for monster on monster crime.
Look at this video user. The damage numbers only show up for the guy playing and not the other hunters even though the other hunters are of course doing damage. In that case why cant the monsters do damage to each other too outside of turf wars? Damage numbers do show if a monster is poisoned and Ive seen a video where a pukei pukei poisoned a G.Jagras and it wasnt part of a turf war so thats another thing you're wrong about.
"another thing"
you mean nothing, because you posted the inital poison buildup was turf war.
You're not one of those retards who think because the Deviljho trailer shows something that's what's gonna happen right?
Having fewer skeleton variations means far less work for the animators. They can apply the same animations to several monsters very easily if they all share a skeleton.
I was watching the MHW coral gameplay and noticed that like 70% of puffboy's attacks were identical to a Rathian's attacks, along with its running and flying animations.
like mentioned, they reuse the shit out of their skeletons.
I just really hate the maps in MHW. Can't find a single fucking video where they aren't faffing about on some gay ledge or ramp.
These games look like shit. Combat looks even worse than Souls, the world seems very uninteresting to explore, and the bossfights take too long to be interesting. Should I even bother?
I'm sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on that.
They are reusing the 3DS skeletons, and the models are as far as I can tell different from those in MH Online.
Keep in mind that World is still running on MT Framework like the last few games, so I would imagine it's easier to import stuff from previous games and just put a new model on top of the old skeleton.
I thought he was a highly evolved pickle.
No. An ebin memester like yourself should feel right at home with le MLG dank seoulxDD.
A turn-based RPG that has 6-8 animations per creature and doesn't have any sort of interaction with the environment can have custom animations for every creature. Action games where creatures interact with and are affected by the environment can have hundreds of animations. In this case, you want bone structures and animations that can be reused for many different creatures.
I know that's not what they are doing. I just said it would make sense if they did because all the work was already there.
The series' main appeal boils down to learning how to fight each monster and cutting down the time it takes to kill them. When you learn the various movesets, cancels, and cooldowns that come with each weapon, you just apply that to whatever monster you're fighting and you adjust your strategy accordingly. The armor and weapon systems just add another layer of depth to it, as well as the depth that comes with learning how to act as a team in multiplayer. Everything else in the game is secondary and are admittedly low-effort (crafting, gathering, level design). Graphics are really a non-issue for the game.
It's the Zinogre skeleton, actually. They're fanged wyverns, not leviathans.
On that note, it's nice to see the fanged wyvern family finally getting some more members. It always annoyed me that Zinogre inexplicably had an entire family all to itself.
I don't know if you've played any other Monster Hunters, but I know for sure many monsters at least in the 3DS ones are also just retextures.
This is the progress they probably go through to make a completely new monster
Of course multiple monsters with similar skeletons might use the same animations, just like all humanoid characters will use the same animations.
However I do not know if this is something Capcom does, however if they do that is true of any type of skeleton.
A four legged monster could share animations with other four legged monsters, etc.
I'm not an animator or a modeler but I've worked a fair amount in tandem with people that are and this is a very generic walkthrough of the process they used to make new models.
tldr: yes changing a texture is easier than making a new model and/or new animations
Having reviewed footage of the demo, that's completely false. The damage other players do doesn't show up, for instance. Even the damage of a turf war won't show up, even if you're just outside the area, unless you're in the area for the little turf war notification to appear on the hud. Also, I distinctly noticed pain animations being caused by a monsters attack. There's obviously a system that only displays damage numbers on certain conditions, like the damage being directly caused by your weapon or a significant event like turf wars. Purely using the presence of damage numbers as evidence is a really dumb thing to do, in this case.
Yeah, i too thought Zinogre having a special snowflake class was kinda dumb.
Now we need more temnocerans and snake wyverns (i dont count remobras rebranding)
meant for
I see where it comes from then
And how exactly do you suggest I research info on the game, otherwise? You've provided no good arguments. Your claim, that all damage to a monster is indicated to the player, is a demonstrable lie just by seeing any co-op gameplay, such as the video in , and your claim, that monsters can't cause each other to stagger, is also false. You say >>14141952's observation of one monster poisoning another is purely from a turf war, even though you haven't seen the video in question. Your tests are hardly inscrutable, as they're based on the false assumption that all damage is indicated. By all observation, you're either drawing bad conclusions based on false information and bad science, or you're deliberately spreading misinformation about a game that already has plenty to complain about, such as all the environmental "help".
The fuck are you even on about again. Aside from you not understanding that tests have shown monsters outside of turf wars can't deal damage to each other, proven further with large monsters inability to kill small monsters from coincidental shots. I.E a rathalos fireball won't kill a small monster even if damage were to be conserved it'd be enough to kill it twice over.
The new world style would call for wholly new animations for every world interaction such as getting trapped in vines or falling down slippery slopes, and the amount of testing to make sure the inverse kinematics weren't going batshit on every bump, tree and rock would probably be pretty grueling.
That said that's no fucking excuse. Modern game developers are lazy, whiny and incompetent and they should get each other's dicks out of their mouths and do their fucking jobs.
Older footage of the game back from just November last year showed the monsters occasionally being extremely jittery/teleport prone. Back when I played the beta monsters stopped being jittery but you could still fuck with their ai relatively easily if you tried.
Western game developers are lazy, whiny and incompetent
Im impressed with all of the technical feats and new mechanics MHW is pulling off even though it lowers the framerate to around 30fps around some points. Im always afraid that the monsters would spazz out or glitch through the map but ive never seen anything like that yet, some of the animations just look weird and not completely natural.
What "tests"? You've only mentioned tests you've done, which you've implied were based on the presence of damage indicators. Given we've established that damage indicators don't show up for every bit of damage done to a monster, judging results based on that is faulty as fuck.
I've done 3d modeling and animation. I can confirm that rigging up a skeleton to a model and having it look right when it moves and be quite difficult depending on the complexity of the model's design and the polygon count.
Everyone drools over 2B's ass and thighs, but from an animation perspective the envelopes controlling the amount of influence each bone has over the model's vertices is truly a work of art. Someone spent a lot of time making sure it was absolutely perfect.
You can of course speed up production by half-assing your rigging and hoping no one notices, which usually happens unless the rigging was truly awful.
I disagree, it's spreading to all sectors of game development, most notably in Japan the big name companies like Capcom, Konami, Bandai-Namco and Square-Enix. It's endemic from indie to AAA, the exceptions are few and far between.
Perhaps I dont play the games with lazy developers to know about that issue at all. Can you give me some examples of lazy/shitty nipponese developers other than keiji inafune? I don't need any western devs because I couldnt give less of a shit about them.
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