What's in 2.1? [The refactored EVA]

One of the big things in 2.1 is the refactored EVA. It's going to feel a little bit weird to people at first, though. I don't want to go too deep on it. So how it worked before was animation-driven motion, which means basically we're just saying entity move here, entity move here, entity move here. And then we do animation to get to that sort of position. Now this is obviously very fake. This is how most characters move around in the world though, when we go animation-driven motion for the characters walking around, things like this. In EVA it's a totally different beast. What we wanted was a pure physical EVA. So now you are a physical representation of a human. We've always had this for on foot and for ragdolls and things like this. What it required was a mix of animation-driven as well as ragdoll. So at the same time, and blending between different ratios, we are ragdolling you or animating you sort of at the same time. This is kind of a weird concept, but it works so much better for EVA than the animation-driven one.

One of the biggest differences, and I don't know if you had ever noticed this, but in our old EVA, this is a person, this is the feet at the bottom. When you would rotate, you would rotate from the feet. Which is ridiculous, and it looks super stupid when you're watching somebody else sort of do this rotation. You need to rotate from center of mass is the whole deal. And if somebody shoots you in the foot, for example, you've got to go end over end, not from the feet. So what we do with the physical representation now, we don't just say, oh, rotate from the hips. We say, rotate from whatever your center of mass is. So if I had a massive head, big set of armor, and then tiny little legs, then I'm going to rotate way up here. If I'm carrying a weapon and I'm generally human, it's going to be near the hips. It's right in this sort of center of mass kind of area. So now you rotate from that when you're controlling.

Additionally, all the thrusters are actually physical. This isn't just a fake effect anymore. So we don't just turn on these little effects and then say, oh, animation-driven, go forward. This is actually, okay, we apply an impulse to the ragdoll. The ragdoll reacts. So this is really cool when you see it happen. You'll go forward and your arms will kind of go like this, because they're sort of flapping out with the ragdoll. And then as we actually get a little bit more normalized, the animation will come back and take over and the pose will go back in. Where this is really cool, and you guys can try this out, and we're going to work on it even more: when you go up close to physics, and I'm going to pretend these two guys are walls, so I've got my hands out sort of like this, and I'm floating over, you're going to see the arm will sort of move in like this. And then it's going to come back out as you move out. Same thing with the feet. So it's pretty cool, actually. The system is similar to something called Morpheme, if people know that. It's used in the FIFA games. EA does something very similar in the FIFA games, which are pretty cool. But obviously they don't do zero-g.

The other problem is all the transitioning. So you've got to go from that sort of entity-driven movement, which could be a whole game in itself, easily, to going down to FPS combat and all this kind of stuff. Where it gets really tricky is actually doing the aim posing. So the aim posing is the hardest part about this. So actually what you guys were seeing in 2.0 is actually a pretty big bug. It might have seemed okay for everyone, but the weapon was way out in front. You could see the back of it. And it's because his hands were completely messed up. It was just sort of hovering out in front. This is not at all what we want EVA combat to be. We actually want EVA combat to be holding the weapon. And you're going to be a little sprawled out like you're swimming, but yeah, you need to be able to aim the weapon like normal. The aim posing is tricky because you need an actual root joint to do all your calculations off of. If you can imagine, you're moving in all these different directions and ways, for us to actually find a root joint that isn't moving is very tricky. So actually what we do is we do not animate the hip joint. So the hip joint is the reference joint for everything. So when we do our polar to rectangular conversions, we can use the actual hip joint for all the angles. So in that way, you have a proper pose that you are holding all the time that's very, very smooth feeling. It feels like an FPS now. So that was a super important part, and it took weeks to get that right, just the math, getting that right.

It's almost like this game isn't finished and it's still in development.

We're always in R&D land, which is awesome. And I would want nothing less. But it makes production hard, because you end up in a weird state where you're supporting live releases, so you kind of have to support some of your legacy stuff. And then when you're going to refactor something, you've got to find a slot to get all that refactored. And guess what? If that's R&D land, you have no idea where the end of that is. That's tricky. So a lot of times what you guys see is a little bit of a half-finished system. And it's not half-finished because we just left it. It's half-finished because that's a state that it's playable that we can give it to you guys.

The physical EVA is the biggest part about 2.1. We've just been working so much on that, just because there's so many bugs around the old EVA, and I can't stand it. There's so many things like the teleporting to zero, zero, zero, that's from EVA. The head being backwards sometimes. There's just so many. There were so many things that I just didn't want to fix because it's like maintaining an old system. And that's the most frustrating part. Already a guy by the name of Jens Lind in the UK helped me with one of these bugs, and I think everybody in the 2.0 PTU had it at some point or another. When you were transitioning into a gravity volume or a gravity box on one of the landing pads, if you were doing any sort of turning, you would keep turning forever. So you would jump, and then you would end up in gravity, and then all of a sudden you'd be spinning around like this, and there was no way to get out of it unless you could get off the pad, unless you could get back into zero gravity, because then it would normalize itself back out. Most people I saw on the livestreams, they were trying so hard to get back off the pad, but you were running in a damn circle, so you couldn't get out. We had to spend a good day and a half fixing that. But in the end, we've now just replaced it. So that day and a half is kind of wasted. But it's not wasted, because you guys played the 2.0 for a week and a half or whatever. But it was time that, of course, we don't want to spend. But that's the difficulty of supporting live and doing development all at the same time.

And it's important to remember, when you see things and you wonder why haven't they fixed that yet, it's possible that it could be in an older system that's being replaced, and we don't want to put that work into the older system that we know we're replacing.

And a lot of people will just go, oh, well, they just don't care about those bugs. Well, sort of, because we know it's going to be gone, or we know we're going to have a different bug with the new system, and we'd rather be working on those. Unfortunately, that's just not as visible in the live releases, I think, sometimes.

That plays a big part in balancing, because we know when the component system comes online and all these things, the power pipes actually start working and stuff, all this balancing is going to be done after all those, not before.