At what point does an animation added for immersion (deck crew assisting a ship landing, crewman eating noodles or cleaning their weapon) become an emote? Is it simply a matter of adding a slash keyword or is it more involved than that? Will we be able to use hand signals to guide ships to the nozzle on the StarFarer? Tactical hand signal? (stop, take cover, etc)asked by Jaxx Ford
TL;DRMaking immersion animations into emotes is not hard in theory, and any emote could let players act as, say, an aircraft marshal; the harder part is design and player-to-player interactions needing the other's acceptance.
This is a good question it's also related to ... there was another question by ... somebody else is on there is it ... Amontillado "Hi guys we're aware that the characters will be able to pull others out of the line of fire during combat but will our characters be able to interact with each other in other circumstances such as pushing, pulling, restraining and hugging?" So these two things are basically ... the answer to these is kind of similar.So in Star Citizen and in the Persistent Universe you're going to start seeing detailed animations for aircraft carrier launches and things like that. And in theory making those animations emotes isn't really too difficult of a thing. We have a lot of eating, we have a lot of drinking. You're going to be able to go a lot of places like nightclubs, and there'll be waitresses there and bartenders and bouncers. We shot motion capture for people selling spaceships and stuff like that, like at a car dealership or things like that.The challenging thing is the design side of this: getting this to play well together and having a connection between the animation. So for the AI we can control the things that we want them to do, when we want them to do it, and how we want them to do it. But for Players it's really kind of restricting. So anything that we create as emotes however you could essentially use as jobs so we have an aircraft marshal ... guy that sort of goes like this [hand gestures] ... kind of like, almost like a work out right?
Yeah it's almost like a work out!
But if we create them as emotes you could actually turn yourself into an aircraft marshal without it being an official job. You can just go out on the tarmac and start start directing traffic. And stuff like that.
I think guys do that already. Totally!
The other problem though with some of these actions, like the bartending and things like that are things ... it's about interacting with other players. The tricky thing here is even though you can do something it's about the acceptance of the other player. So if I want to make out with Sean Tracy [Sean is shaking his head] he has to accept that offer otherwise I'm going to end up back in the HR office again. So the same thing is true ...
It's only because you're using tongue. It's okay if it's not with tongue.
[laughs] Well you heard it hear folks!
No, it's not okay even without tongue.
So ... yeah ... I think that's ...
It's awful.
[off camera] It's not making out if there's no tongue.
Okay, fair enough!