Swimming feels weird

[caillou_divin]

When swimming in-game (especially underwater), I feel like it's janky, like you can't control your movements properly and it can be quite frustrating in certain situations.
Just wanted to know if I was the only one thinking that and if the developers knew it?

[MKMoose]

23 minutes ago, caillou_divin said:

When swimming in-game (especially underwater), I feel like it's janky, like you can't control your movements properly and it can be quite frustrating in certain situations.

I find that swimming tends to suffer from the same issue that makes creative flying annoy me, which is pitch not being locked to zero. That is, forward and backward movement follows where the player is looking instead of being locked to the horizontal plane.

Other than that, I've found swimming in VS to be fantastic due to how weighty it feels, largely owing to using periodic bursts of movement instead of a constand movement speed - it's actually kind of immersive and it feels like underwater movement to me. That is in stark contrast to walking and running, which feel like creative movement and have basically zero weight behind them.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums!

23 minutes ago, caillou_divin said:

I feel like it's janky, like you can't control your movements properly and it can be quite frustrating in certain situations.

It's probably due to the fact that the momentum actually matches the swim animation. The character does a kind of "frog paddle", which will thrust the character forward in short bursts rather than one continuous smooth movement(which is the style many games use regardless of animation). 

Personally, I've never really found it to be particular janky. At least, no more than any other movement/animation in the game. Some animations are rougher than others since they're simpler placeholders, and cleaning up art and animations is usually work reserved for the final stages of polish, where the underlying codework isn't likely to change very much. The only thing I really have to nitpick here is that the froggy paddle works fine for swimming underwater, but it's a strange choice for the surface since that's not how most people swim on the surface.

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

That is in stark contrast to walking and running, which feel like creative movement and have basically zero weight behind them.

Kind of. There's a little bit of weight there, it's just a bit subtle. It's a lot more noticeable if you run around in third-person, since the character will actually lean slightly when switching directions while running.

[caillou_divin]

43 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I find that swimming tends to suffer from the same issue that makes creative flying annoy me, which is pitch not being locked to zero. That is, forward and backward movement follows where the player is looking instead of being locked to the horizontal plane.

Other than that, I've found swimming in VS to be fantastic due to how weighty it feels, largely owing to using periodic bursts of movement instead of a constand movement speed - it's actually kind of immersive and it feels like underwater movement to me. That is in stark contrast to walking and running, which feel like creative movement and have basically zero weight behind them.

Sorry I wasn't precise enough 
When I meant that underwater swimming is weird, it's especially in situations where you need to navigate up and down a lot.
Idk if I'm really bad at it, but I'm often stuck when exploring underwater ruins.

And yes, the strokes the character does when swimming straight are not a problem, a really awesome detail even!

Edited Thursday at 02:48 PM by caillou_divin

[MKMoose]

38 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Kind of. There's a little bit of weight there, it's just a bit subtle. It's a lot more noticeable if you run around in third-person, since the character will actually lean slightly when switching directions while running.

That leaning to the side is purely visual, though, no? Based on my experience and on the code, horizontal movement seems to be normally just directly equal to the input, with no drag or anything of the sort. It allows you to jerk around wildly, practically just as fast as you can move your fingers. Changing direction is instant, hence I say that movement lacks weight.

This is usually good for creative building or whatnot, but it isn't particularly immersive, and for combat it can easily be argued to be detrimental - moving towards or away from an enemy is not a commitment at all, because it can be freely reversed at any moment to bait then avoid an attack.

 

1 minute ago, caillou_divin said:

When I meant that underwater swimming is weird, it's especially in situations where you need to navigate up and down a lot.

If that's what the problem is, then what I mentioned may indeed be the culprit. Because when you look up or down at steep angles, then moving forward and backward becomes essentially impossible due to those inputs being transformed to be very similar to dedicated vertical movement inputs.

[caillou_divin]

4 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

That leaning to the side is purely visual, though, no? Based on my experience and on the code, horizontal movement seems to be normally just directly equal to the input, with no drag or anything of the sort. It allows you to jerk around wildly, practically just as fast as you can move your fingers. Changing direction is instant, hence I say that movement lacks weight.

This is usually good for creative building or whatnot, but it isn't particularly immersive, and for combat it can easily be argued to be detrimental - moving towards or away from an enemy is not a commitment at all, because it can be freely reversed at any moment to bait then avoid an attack.

 

If that's what the problem is, then what I mentioned may indeed be the culprit. Because when you look up or down at steep angles, then moving forward and backward becomes essentially impossible due to those inputs being transformed to be very similar to dedicated vertical movement inputs.

Okay, I didn't know that!
Well, it doesn't fix the problem, but now I understand.
Thanks a lot for that!

[LadyWYT]

36 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

That leaning to the side is purely visual, though, no? Based on my experience and on the code, horizontal movement seems to be normally just directly equal to the input, with no drag or anything of the sort. It allows you to jerk around wildly, practically just as fast as you can move your fingers. Changing direction is instant, hence I say that movement lacks weight.

This is usually good for creative building or whatnot, but it isn't particularly immersive, and for combat it can easily be argued to be detrimental - moving towards or away from an enemy is not a commitment at all, because it can be freely reversed at any moment to bait then avoid an attack.

Pretty much. Which I do agree, it's probably a concession made so that the player can have more precise control over navigating the world, at least when it comes to land-based navigation. I'm not really sure that that should change either. Yes, adding some weight to the player's movements would make it more immersive, and mean that the player needs to think more carefully about what they're doing when it comes to combat and hanging around ledges and things. But I could also easily see a lot of players getting frustrated because they fell down a hole/fell off a ledge, or otherwise did something detrimental because they miscalculated an action. The key probably comes down to the timing--the weight behind the actions doesn't need to be absolutely realistic, but rather just enough to make the action feel like a movement.

 

53 minutes ago, caillou_divin said:

Idk if I'm really bad at it, but I'm often stuck when exploring underwater ruins.

In addition to what MKMoose said, be aware that water currents in Vintage Story are harder to swim against as well. It's pretty easy to get swept into a hole you can't escape from and drown as a result.

[caillou_divin]

4 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

In addition to what MKMoose said, be aware that water currents in Vintage Story are harder to swim against as well. It's pretty easy to get swept into a hole you can't escape from and drown as a result.

This has indeed happened and more than once 

[Banch]

The water currents are usually my problem too, when trying to dig out underwater ruins I sometimes end up being pushed up and away from the bottom somehow.