Risen - More Screens

First, World of Risen has their latest Friday screenshot. Some boars get the attention, this week.
Second, French site Jeux Video has some console screens, including a shot showing the different (tabbed) character interface (thanks also to WoR).
More information.

many of their screens (not necessarily those linked above) still seem to have stretching issues, wrong aspect ratio etc (just look at the moon in some pics).
i'm curious to see if it's due to the material pb send out, or due to retarded zines staff that mess things up in order to fit their logo on the pic, or the pics to their own gallery layout.
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Motorcycle tires

Is it me, or is there some seriously weird anatomy going on with those tusks?

Prime Junta said:

Is it me, or is there some seriously weird anatomy going on with those tusks?

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Its not you and there is nothing wrong with those tusks.
Our laws of evolution do not apply on the Island of Risen.

My interest for Risen is rising, especially since I just watched the plot trailer for the first time ( not sure how I missed that ) and it actually looked like it has a lot stronger story than G2 or 3.

The screens look great as always, graphically I'm more concerned about the human animations than anything else. I wonder if someday we'll have a fully mapped muscle and bone models and the animations are generated procedurely. Save a lot of work for the animators and have models move a lot more fluidly. For instance: in a lot of the Risen videos available there's a man sweeping the ground. His sweeping looks a little rigid then in 3 distinct motions he goes from sweeping, to standing holding the broom, to walking. A real person would shift the weight of the broom to carry to one hand while turning his hips and taking the first step.

Then again, since we've switched to a real 3d models with IK bone structures I'm sure a lot of animations are carried over from one game to the next and they'll all slowly improve with time. As long as humans don't radically change shape...

BTW, my tangent wasn't intended to be a knock on Risen, all games have this problem and the animators can only drink so much caffeine.

LuckyCarbon said:

The screens look great as always, graphically I'm more concerned about the human animations than anything else. I wonder if someday we'll have a fully mapped muscle and bone models and the animations are generated procedurely.

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Yeah the animations are really lagging behind compared to the other parts of a game (graphics and sound)..

When you look at cut-scenes the animations in most/many games are superb, but in-game they can look look out right horrible. Why all that work for a short cut-scene to get the animations right, but in the game it looks like they didnt put any effort into it. Can't they just use those animations, guess it'll be too demaning or something (im not an animator so i dont have much insight into this).

"Spore" is supposed to have Procedural animation i have read somewhere.

bemushroomed said:

Yeah the animations are really lagging behind compared to the other parts of a game (graphics and sound)..

When you look at cut-scenes the animations in most/many games are superb, but in-game they can look look out right horrible. Why all that work for a short cut-scene to get the animations right, but in the game it looks like they didnt put any effort into it. Can't they just use those animations, guess it'll be too demaning or something (im not an animator so i dont have much insight into this).

"Spore" is supposed to have Procedural animation i have read somewhere.

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Typically, you have a completely different team handling cut-scenes - especially if it's a high production value scene. Also, there are several performance considerations with "realistic" animations - because with more detail and variation you have to take a lot of factors into consideration, like how different weapons and equipment behave as the character is interacting with the environment or fighting in combat. This is especially true for a game like Gothic with multiple weapon types - both ranged and melee. During a specific cut-scene - you're in complete control as an animator/artist - because the player isn't interacting with your game. This means you can "fine-tune" everything to look perfect and you generally have people specialised for these things - and there are only a handful of teams hired for big productions because of this.

Yes, but even if they have separate teams they can still share the animation files.

But like you said, its a lot more work getting animations into a game then into a cut-scene.. maybe if the devs just stopped spending people/money/time on cut-scenes and only on in-game material we'd have animations that were really good

I think Blizzard has some really smooth animations going on in WoW, they're really skilled at it..

Way too much bloom / specular effects.