A thought about running and running animation

[stylee]

I'm not really complaining, just thinking about why video game running so often looks "stiff" or artificial, especially when compared to other movement that often looks quite natural.

One big thing, in my opinion, is the fact that IRL people who are sprinting are always either accelerating or decelerating. This is something that can be backed up by split times. No one ever really maintains "Top Speed" for more than an instant.

While this might seem a little academic - after all, the acceleration might be by only .01 in a given 10 meter split - the visual effect is quite noticable.

Stride rate and stride frequency changes as you increase and decrease speed. That means stride rate and stride frequency is CONSTANTLY changing in football.

In a game like football, this means that the leg action of a back charging to the line right after taking a handoff will be vastly different from that of a Wide Reciever who is in the open field.

I'm not really sure how this could ever really be represented in a video game because I don't know anything about programming or graphics or anything.

But it seems to me that this is why running looks so canned in video games - it never really shows the high variance of leg and arm action that happens on every single run.

I'm also not complaining, like I said. I can certainly live with how it's done now.

Any thoughts?

[zoltan]

good post, i've always thought the runnings anis sucked in next gen..... maybe its the whole 60 frames per second deal.

but now that they've been like that forever on next gen....... they sorert of have a feel to them so its not that bad...i just hated when your guy used to bounce when he was tired last year

[Biodawg03]

I think one of the major problems was that the strides are too long... the players legs come up so high that it just looks weird. This is something that the Madden guys have fixed and hopefully will be carried over to NCAA as well (yeah right).

It has to do with the players being unrealistically fast as well. The game plays so fast that the guys are just turning their legs over so quick it looks fake.

I also hated when you didn't have the sprint button down and your guys would kinda stand straight up and do this wierd bouncing stride... just totally wrong.

[da ThRONe]

What about juke moves and spins they are pretty awful as well.

[Moostache]

Personally I do not have a problem with the animations as much as the lack of acceleration and deceleration to the way they play...the movements themselves are not too bad to me (and I like them better than last-gen, which had a weird arm swing and also lacked accel/decel).

The player models do not show movements of shifting their weight or slowing down before moving in another direction and that kills the whole thing for me. It cannot look more real if the player can continue to do things that our minds instantly identify as physically impossible on every snap.

[J-Unit40]

Quote: Originally Posted by da ThRONe

What about juke moves and spins they are pretty awful as well.

The spin moves are absolutely terrible. The only spin move in the game I like is when a defender hits your ballcarrier and you spin on your own. That actually looks pretty natural. The animation was also in old-gen as well (I saw and replayed it on NCAA 07 XBOX last night and loved it.)

[SA1NT401]

the animations as a WHOLE are god awful. From catch animations to OL/DL interactions. Everything plays STUPID fast but animates at half the speed.

Curious about NCAA10 as the whether it will be an improvement over 09 (WORST version EVER btw). But from the info we have now, it looks like they focused 90% of the development on FEATURES (which is great) but have really done VERY little to how the game plays and that it what really matters.

NCAA USED to be WAY better than madden i just about every way, but it looks like they are going the ARCADE route more than anything. From the videos thus far, it looks like it plays FASTER and that is not a good thing at all.

We will see in about 2 months. But as of now, i am VERY hesitant to say the least.

We get Ian and Co for madden....Where is the NCAA10 presence? That is what is making me more concerned.

[da ThRONe]

Quote: Originally Posted by SA1NT401

the animations as a WHOLE are god awful. From catch animations to OL/DL interactions. Everything plays STUPID fast but animates at half the speed. Curious about NCAA10 as the whether it will be an improvement over 09 (WORST version EVER btw). But from the info we have now, it looks like they focused 90% of the development on FEATURES (which is great) but have really done VERY little to how the game plays and that it what really matters. NCAA USED to be WAY better than madden i just about every way, but it looks like they are going the ARCADE route more than anything. From the videos thus far, it looks like it plays FASTER and that is not a good thing at all. We will see in about 2 months. But as of now, i am VERY hesitant to say the least. We get Ian and Co for madden....Where is the NCAA10 presence? That is what is making me more concerned.

I didnt realise how bad 09 was until I stop wanting to play it like 3months after. I usually would be playing until the next year game dropped lately Im looking online to see what the next year games going look like.