Luk

lol I have played Dota 2! Dota Allstars was never really my favorite AoS (or moba as they call it nowadays) tho. I loved Age of Myths, EotA, and Advent of the Zenith though. And Dark Deeds was a lot of fun.

Here's another poll, separated for the sake of discussion and clarity. We've also been discussing the multiplayer experience, and we're curious to see how our players like to enjoy the game. Do you only play solo? Do you like large servers, or just small groups with friends/family? And what kind of configuration do you prefer? Please let us know what you think! And again, feel free to comment below to describe your own multiplayer preferences. Thanks!

Hey everyone, The team has been discussing class balance lately, and we wanted to get an idea of how players feel about the current classes. Please let us know what you think! And feel free to comment below if you'd like to discuss the issue further. I'll be reading through it. Thanks!

Okay, so by request, I've typed out some more tutorial information for animation. This will be an intermediate level tutorial done mostly in the form of techniques and ideas to keep in mind when animating. In particular, we'll be working with a WIP walk cycle for Balduranne's panther model. Here's the file if you want to follow along: male(Original).json Okay, so we’re working on a walk cycle. For this example, let’s focus on quadruped walking. Also, if you see any weird stuttering in the gifs, that's a result of recording them, not the animation itself. (Edit: gifs aren't working. Need a tutorial on how to use the internet.) Here's the original walk cycle: Step 1: Keyframes When making a walk animation, I’d suggest starting with two keyframes. More generally speaking: when making an animation, I’d suggest starting with keyframes that show the extremes of motion. For a walk cycle, this is the moment when the animal reaches its front foot to step forward and the moment when the animal pushes its hind foot off the ground behind it. So a reach and a push. And this happens with both legs. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “That sounds like four keyframes instead of two”. Well, you’re right, but that’s harder to do at the beginning. For now, I’d say synchronize the reach and push to be at the same time and then make one keyframe for the right legs and one for the left legs. That might be a little confusing. What I’m saying is, make one keyframe where the left front leg and left hind leg are reaching forward, and then make another keyframe where the right front leg and the right hind leg are reaching forward. Result of changes: Step 2: Frame Distances Now, look at how jerky the motion is. Walk cycles don’t have to be perfectly smooth, but the very nature of walking is generally stable and repetitive. If your keyframes are too far apart from each other, the animation will have slow moments and fast moments. This can be good later on (particularly if you want a limping cycle), but for now we want stability. Stability also helps us see what else we can do to improve the animation, since jerkiness can be harder to read. So generally what I do is, I’ll place one keyframe at frame #0, and then the other keyframe at the middle of the animation. So since this animation has 35 frames total, I’ll put it at frame #17. This ensures that the frames are an even distance from each other, which gives us ideal stability. You don’t have to use #0 and #17 if you don’t want to. So long as the keyframes are equidistant from each other, you can place them anywhere and it will work fine, but using the beginning and middle of the animation just makes it a lot simpler and cleaner, if you ask me. Result: Step 3: Patterns Okay, this can be tricky because a lot of animals will vary their walking patterns depending on their speed. Some of them have like eight different patterns. In this particular case, the panther is actually made with the wrong pattern for this speed. Notice how the legs are paired diagonally (meaning the right front leg and the left hind leg have the same motion)? This is a trot, and it’s something they tend to do more when they’re sneaking as opposed to walking. Their walking pattern is actually more of a pace (I think it’s a stepping pace, if we’re being specific), where their legs are paired laterally, meaning the right front leg and the right hind leg have the same motion. Look up horse or dog gaits for a better understanding of walk/run patterns. It makes it a lot easier. They even include how many feet are touching the ground at one time. Apparently equestrian people love this stuff, idk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait Result: Step 4: Body Connections Acting out animations is probably the best thing you can do. Take note of how your body moves. It moves A LOT. If you don’t know how an animal moves, just watch footage of it. If you get stuck and you’re not sure how to improve it, consider the principles of animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation As is mentioned in the article, squash and stretch are very important. Even though the ah, stretch tool doesn’t work in the editor, you can still simulate stretch through rotation and positioning. Consider the panther: When he’s reaching his front left paw forward, what do you think his shoulder is doing? Try reaching forward with your own arm and watch how your torso rotates. It probably does the same thing as the panther. A helpful mindset is to think that every piece of the animal is connected. If you move one, it should invariably affect the rest of the pieces. Oftentimes the causality isn’t that simple, but maybe that’s getting too complicated. Consider the panther again: You can follow along with this video to see what I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gThIDTb9k6w I’ll break down the motions and connections step by step: - Starting the motion from the rear, the panther contracts its right hind leg, pushes into the ground, and uses that force to propel itself forward. - This causes the right hind leg to extend as the body is pushed forward. - The panther’s hips are attached to the right hind leg, so they’re pulled towards that leg. Pulled down and to the right. - Now we have the left hind leg, which is attached to the hips. Since the hips are rotating down and to the right, the left hind leg is now lifted up and to the right. This places it closer to the center of the body, so it acts as a vertical pillar to hold the panther’s weight after it finishes its right hind leg push. - Okay, now what else is attached to the hips? The torso. Since the lower half of the body is reaching down and to the right, the torso has to counterbalance or the panther will fall over. So the torso rotates up and to the left. - The front left arm, having been pushed forward by the rotating torso, is now in a perfect position to reach forward for another step. - The front right arm has been pulled back into a central position like the left hind leg. It also acts as a pillar to hold the panther’s weight while the front left arm is reaching. - What else is connected to the torso? The neck. As the torso rotates, it pushes and pulls the neck with it. Pull to the right, push to the left. Since the panther wants to look straight ahead, the neck has to compensate for the torso, so it rotates in the opposing direction. - This keeps the head fairly stable, but it will compensate a bit depending on how much the torso affects the neck. The direction it rotates in is generally just towards the front. - B-but what about the ears and the tail?? Eh, they’re kind of autonomous. Sometimes they don’t rotate at all, sometimes they do. You’ll have to experiment to see what you like. Generally, I’ll animate them to show emotion, as a lot of animals will use them when attacking or fleeing. Ah, text is a poor medium for this. A good understanding of newtonian physics is also very useful here in that it can help you determine where to simulate force (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) and that can translate into a sense of weightiness in the animation. Yeah, anatomy and physics are super useful. Also music. Results: ( I was going to do a core body rotation gif first, but I messed it up and didn’t notice until after, so RIP) Okay, that’s looking better. The body movements are still a little awkward, but it’s good enough for now. Sometimes you just have to look at it again the next day to see what needs fixing. Step 5: Adding Keyframes Okay, remember what I said at the beginning about how this walk cycle should actually have at least 4 keyframes? The panther’s legs may move laterally, but they don’t move simultaneously. When the right front leg is reaching into the air, the right hind leg is already touching the ground to support it. They’re on the same rhythm, but not the same beat, if that makes sense. Ah, I can’t remember the proper musical term. So what we want to do is, add more keyframes so that each leg can touch the ground at its own pace, creating a more natural walk for the panther. You might want to look around for more information about the Stepping Pace to figure out exactly how the feet are supposed to act. If you don’t want to do that, here’s a summary: Implementing this might be a little complicated if you’ve never tried it before. It’s kind of done by adding keyframes just for one leg, duplicating the original values for the leg’s rotation and position, and then removing their original keyframe. The idea is just that you’re transposing the whole animation cycle for one leg onto a different part of the rhythm. And also making sure the leg appears to stay in place on the ground when it’s not being lifted. Definitely make sure you have a backup file saved at this point, if you’re not used to it. Alright uhhh this is getting a little too complicated to explain well.. Maybe I'll end it on this lesson and continue it later. Results: Ah, it’s fun working with more anatomically realistic models. And more work lol. So maybe it’s just me, but I feel like after this step it really started to come together. Notice how fluid the movements are? I only did the left side because A) it’ll hopefully make it easier to see what I did with the keyframes, and B) it’s late. So that’s about it for today. I can explain more if anyone has any questions. I left out a lot of the technical steps in favor of the abstract, because I feel that's more easily applied to more animations. But if you want to know precisely how I did each step, just let me know. Here's the updated json file if you wanna look it over: male_2.json

Hello Vintarians! As some of you may know, Lo-Phi (Hayden) and I showcased Vintage Story at the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina last week. This was a nice opportunity for us to share the game with the public and get some valuable feedback from industry professionals as well. So what kind of feedback did we get? Well, we realized pretty quickly that it was hard for players to just jump in and enjoy the game, since it can be a little complex. With that in mind, I’m planning to do some work to provide in-game tutorial information for new players to work off of. Hit me up on the forums or in Discord if there was any concept that tripped you up early or anything you’d like to suggest for a better new player experience. However! The conference attendees were generally impressed once they started to understand the game’s depth and detail. In particular, things like the crafting systems, worldgen, and visuals were highly praised. We had a couple level designers, animators, and 3D modelers who appreciated the potential that our creative tools and model editor offer. Beyond that, many of the players excitedly suggested that we allow for custom tools and weapons using the voxel-based crafting system. Who knows? Maybe that’s something we’ll see in the future! All in all, it was an enjoyable experience and one that gave us another chance to improve Vintage Story even further. Now it’s time for us to get to work and show our dedication to any new players that might have signed up after ECGC came to a close. Also, we’ll be presenting Vintage Story again in July for the ReVersed Festival in Vienna! Come say hello to the European team members! View full record

Warcraft 3. I'm still waiting for some of the custom maps from that game to make their way into standalones like League of Legends.

Hey skol, I'm glad you liked it! You bring up an interesting idea. We've talked about the potential consequences of death with other players before, but as far as I know, the development team hasn't come to a conclusion yet. This would be worth bringing up for sure. So I'm assuming the player wouldn't have to sit through the time pass, right? That would be really boring to just see a black screen for thirty minutes (unless there was something else they could do in the meantime). The resurrection idea sounds cool, too! Reminds me of running around looking for my corpse in World of Warcraft.

I think I prefer gravestone as well. Nothing makes me want to quit faster than losing all my resources because I can't find my way back in time. I think I'd be willing to deal with that loss on a higher difficulty, though.

Ahh, I like the way you think. Like I mentioned earlier, we want to leave a lot of this story for the players to solve. So I don't think I should mention whether you're off or on with your deductions. Things should become clearer as we add more story elements to the game, but part of the reason why we created this thread was for players to create theories and discuss the story hints and themes! So if anybody else agrees or disagrees with Thalius' thoughts, please throw your ideas out there! That being said, I really enjoy hearing what everyone has to say about our first story. We plan to have another one released for the website soon.

Hey Thalius, glad you liked it! I think we're mostly on the same page about this, so I hope you explore more of what the story has to offer when we get it live in the game. A lot of my inspiration for the narrative design of this story comes from games like Dark Souls and Morrowind. Games with incredible stories that aren't force fed to the player. They're hidden under the surface, waiting for curious players to go digging for them. Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally), both of those games and Vintage Story involve a lot of searching underground.

Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. I'll keep it in mind, skol. Emergent narrative is definitely something to strive for in a sandbox/survival game such as Vintage Story. However, I would say that achieving that emergent narrative does require a good foundation for players to build off of. And that's what we're striving for. I just want to give players something to work with. From what you've said, I think this foundation may include more information than you'd prefer, but I've found that making a narrative foundation too bare bones can result in a complete oversight of story in a game. Players tend to forget the briefly mentioned quest or backstory and focus entirely on gameplay. At the very least, I would like to provide players with another facet of Vintage Story for their enjoyment, should they be interested in it. Edit: Maybe I should emphasize that a little more. The story will be entirely optional, so if a player tends to feel restricted by narrative in games, they're free to avoid it entirely.

Thanks for the feedback, redram. I'm not really looking for any stories in particular. I'd just like to give players the option to share whatever they'd like to share here. We almost always have at least one story to share from any game experience, whether it's the time you got a pentakill or the time you lost all your items in lava. I'd like this to be an avenue for people to share things that they've found exciting. And if anybody wants to make a more fictional story, I think that sounds great too. A game like Vintage Story is all about creativity, right? With your technical comments, could you tell me what is the most prevalent thing in your head as you read that passage? I have reasons for the format, but rather than defend myself I think it would be better to hear what made you prefer one decision over another in this case. As for whether it is an allegory or not, I'll leave that up to you to decide.

Hello Vintarians! I'm Luke, the lead story writer for Vintage Story. For anybody who is confused: Yes, Vintage Story is going to have a narrative aspect. It hasn't been implemented yet, but I'm excited to say that we've added a little excerpt to the website so that players may get a taste of what's to come. https://www.vintagestory.at/story-excerpt.html/ Let me know what you think about it! And if you have any suggestions, critiques, or stories of your own, please feel free to post them here! I'll be stopping in here and there to talk with anyone who's interested.