Will ladder climbing ever be given manual control as in most games? Currently we have to wait for a climbing animation to play out regardless of whether we want to change directions, stop, slow down, speed up or jump off. Is this being thought about, or is the current system more or less final?asked by Socrates

What's he talking about? The ladders? In the FPS, you're able to get on the ladder, you're able to climb, you're able to go down.

So I think the problem is that they haven't seen a lot of the FPS yet and a lot of the FPS levels have a lot more ladders within them. So I think he's actually talking mostly about the ship ladders and different implementation of course than the environment ladders are. There's a whole reason for this, mostly because they have to be items within the ship, there's interactive animation components to it, but essentially those ones have an exit/enter animation whereas the environment ladders actually have the exact functionality he's talking about which is climbing up, climbing down, jumping down.

It's really irritating, since you're getting into the ship because it's like (does an example of climbing really slowly).

Because you're kind of stuck in this whole thing.

(Still acting in slow motion) Maybe I'll go out and get a doughnut, somebody bring the coffee.

And you might be under fire.

Exactly, so I think that the short answer is because it's an enter animation and it functions as an enter animation that likely you won't be able to go up/down, up/down, up/down, off of it. However the lethargy within a lot of those enter animations drives me crazy.

That is a really good word.

Thank you, I had that in my back pocket the whole day.

Really? You were just waiting to use it, you saw it online one night.

We actually are working on creating three different speeds, so we have the relaxed walk speed which is currently what you see in the game for most of the characters. If you want to hit the Caps-Lock button, and he saunters off to grab himself a cappuccino or something, but the default one will be much faster so we're starting to put those in. Then we also have emergency ones, so we had one where the guy runs, and jumps, and clears like three-quarters of the ladder, grabs onto it, jumps in. When we captured this the actor coming out he actually, because we built the Avenger on set like full sized height sort of thing on set obviously we don't need the armor or anything like that, but he was jumping out of it from that height and landing and rolling and everything was cool, and then he missed the landing and he jacked up his ankle and was out for a couple weeks and I felt absolutely terrible.

Do you think motion capture actors get, like, workers comp? "I was jumping out of a pretend spaceship and then..."

Uh, yes through the union I think they might get something but...

I just wonder what those reports would look like. "I was jumping out a spaceship, and I twisted my ankle..."

But I felt like absolute [BLEEP] because he had a great gig coming up, like a couple days later, and he ended up having to call the director and tell him that he couldn't make it because he couldn't, you know, walk. But it was two weeks later he was up on his feet and stuff like that, awesome guy, but yeah they really put their heart and soul into some of these things and their ankles. So we're going to speed those things up.

And that's the ship enter stuff and the ladders, again, in the environment act exactly like you've suggested which is pretty standard to most games, you always want that kind of control because you can't be halfway up the ladder and decided to jump off and you have to climb all the way back down.

Yeah that would really suck.

Yes, that would be super annoying.

Cool!