On a scale of: Crash Bandicoot 2 to Uncharted 3, how smooth and realistic should the finalized 3rd person animations look when juking and turning your character? It seems that with more smoothness and realistic 3rd person animations comes a more uncomfortable 1st person view. What balance do you intend to strike?asked by Socrates

I liked Crash Bandicoot 2.

I kind of did too.

Didn't you like Crash Bandicoot 2?

But when you're talking about-SB: That was fun!

Yeah, but when you're talking about the animations and animation director, I mean you would probably have a much better eye on that than I would, but a bit chunky animations, lots of lethargy.

You know those guys down the street and they're going to come over here and start beating you up.

No I actually know those guys.

So the answer is that yes, you're correct. It's certainly is a problem when you're trying to get what is really realistic 3rd person animations. When you're talking about something like Uncharted 3 where they're able to spend time really getting those transitions and making them feel good from how your character looks and then you put that in first person and what ends up happening is because you can't see your body, you're getting these weird sort of pauses in how your character is moving and it feels wrong, especially with a weapon in your hand it feels lethargic.

Lethargy.

And it just feels uncontrollable. There is a balance that we have to get there so that we start with capture in third person and look to see what that looks like and then we start to break down what are the important parts of this animation so as the guys coming in, his squash that comes down like this, the overlap of this part of his body and we have to basically start dialing the time it takes those animations down. It's really just the balancing act. Ultimately when we're talking about the FPS combat, it's the combat that's going to win.

Right.

Right. In the Persistent Universe when you're walking around, we have a little bit more freedom in being able to sort of marry those two, the first person and the 3rd person concepts together a little bit more and we're able to get away with a little bit more lag if you will when in first person and stuff like that, but in combat it really is ... We've been working on it for a couple months now so we've been going back and forth, lets pull it out, okay well that has to get faster, but it can't get faster the way it looks, so we'll cut the time down here, but we'll squash the character bit more so that as we do that blending in and out of that we're still getting the squash in the character.

I can tell it's taking every ounce of effort not to stand up and start doing your examples, this is a very classic Steve Bender thing and I'm not sure you should be bound to the chair. I think you should unbind yourself and be free.

Be free! No not that kind of free!