How are FPS animations coming, specifically with the unification between first and third person?

Really well. There was a great thing that happened about two months ago. Our animation director, Steve Bender, had gone out to Frankfurt and did a lot of direct work with our animation R&D programmer. And just so you guys know a little bit of history on this, too, we did work together at Crytek: the R&D animation engineer, Steve Bender and myself. And there were a lot of guys within Crytek, and we had tried to unify this for Crysis 2 and even for Crysis 3. And we were all pretty much set in the way that you can't. You just can't. There is no way to do it. You're always going to be chasing your tail. What looks good in first person doesn't look good in third person, and vice versa. But we made a change. I've got to leave a little bit of magic, so I'm not going to say exactly what it was, but we solved the problem. And by we, it was really Ivo Herzeg, the Frankfurt engineer, that with really kind of one line of code solved it. And it was interesting, I made a little meme for him, like, 'a thousand man hours I do in one line' or something like that. But yeah, we solved this.

The nice thing about it is it feels like an FPS again. It feels like the weapon is in the right place. It's not bouncing around. If you go look at the older videos of the FPS before any of this implementation went in, the weapon's bouncing around everywhere. It doesn't really look like the solidified first-person shooter. At the same time, we didn't want to have a static weapon. We just don't want to have a floaty weapon. Chris talks about it all the time. He just doesn't want a weapon sitting there floating in your view. He wants it to feel like you are holding it. But at the same time, it's got to feel super responsive. And the real problem with it is that in a first-person shooter, the weapon is the only thing that communicates your movement to you. So if you're turning, for example, that weapon needs to cant and things like this. A good one is cover. So when you go into cover, you can't tell if you're sort of poking your head out or if you've just moved the weapon. So it's the only thing that really informs your movement in first person. So if you're juking, if you're doing things like this, the weapon needs to move, and that needs to translate to, oh, okay, that's how my character is moving. A third-person game doesn't have this problem, because you're staring at the character. You know exactly what he's doing. But a first-person game definitely does, because you don't know necessarily what your feet are doing, what your whole body is doing. So it gets tricky in cover.

I would say that it's going really well, probably better than it ever has been, especially since that change, because we've made a bunch of adjustments based on that that will make developing stuff even easier. A good example of this is we've added an extra layer of animation. There's actually like four or five different layers that are happening when we're in first person. But one of the big ones is this weapon hands overlay. It's a clip that we can put on. So essentially what it does is, we have very similar animations for rifles, but we might have different sizes of rifles. So we might have a sniper rifle, where actually I can't hold back here, I'm actually going to have to hold over here. Now my hand poses haven't changed dramatically, but they've changed enough that actually we have to do something. So what you'll see is we've got this extra layer of animation where actually all we do is we just put one animation to move that hand to that location. We link everything up with IK and we're good to go. So what this all means is that we can make more weapons faster without having to uniquely animate every single one of them. That's a big, big win.

And sorry, I know I just keep talking on and on. The start-stops have made super good progress. So this was some interesting stuff that Steve Bender actually came up with some really good ideas on. And then the jukes themselves are still a bit of a challenge. We've got them, and they're responsive now. And so everybody knows, in the original implementation, the jukes felt super unresponsive. That was our really biggest problem with it, just being totally open about it. I'm a mouse and keyboard guy, so you'd be playing on mouse and keyboard and you would be strafing right, and then all of a sudden you would press left and something would happen, and then eventually you would end up going left. And even having six frames of delay or seven frames of delay was enough that it felt super sluggish. That was the problem. And that was one of our concerns in releasing it, because if you didn't see what was happening in third person... it was awesome in third person. If we were making a third-person game, we would have been done. That was easy. But in first person it's so much harder to communicate that movement, and most people are so used to Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like this that has this instant response, and we have to keep that instant response, because otherwise it's not that fun. You feel like your character is controlling you rather than you controlling your character. So there's been some great stuff on the start-stops.

Then additionally, you probably saw that there's new locomotion sets within the mini PU. So those are working really well. The other thing that's kind of exciting about them, and it depends who you are to see how exciting this is, is that there's three cycles within them. So these are three-cycle runs, three-cycle walks. And what I mean by three cycles is left, right, left, right, left, right. The reason that's good is that we can actually make it not completely symmetrical. So basically the second step on that has just a tiny bit of a shoulder dip in it or something like this. They tend to look a lot more realistic than just a single-cycle run, because a single-cycle run is perfect all the time. You never, ever see anything different. But if you go into the game right now, the one that's the most obvious is the backup, and it's probably a little too obvious, and we'll probably chill it out. But when you're running backwards, you'll notice that the shoulders kind of dip down into it. It's only on one of the cycles, but it looks really good, I think. It looks a lot more real, is the point.