Programmable Emotes and Gestures

There is a clear and obvious problem with what I am suggesting, but let's pretend not everyone would get this feature, that only trusted adventures would. Maybe an approval process... who know.

It would be cool is you gave the ability to program in some descriptive way the ability to, let's say, "break dance". Or to create some kind of program language that let me do situps. Or other emotions and actions I cant think of.

Now obviously there are problems, like people making a gesture for flipping the bird. But just for this suggestion, let's say there is a level of control you have put in place to prevent that. Maybe a review system, or a 'trusted' category.

I would defiantly be creating neat dances that I can upload and share with other people so they can dance with me. Or some special clan solute.



I would enjoy it greatly.

 

I believe animations are really hard to implement. But the game does take crowd sourced submissions.

 

Now that they released the skeleton, Mel has been planning to use his motion capture setup to make awesome character animations for SotA. The problem is that Portalarium gave us the asset right when he got a ton of work for his studio so now he will have to fit assets for the game in his ever shrinking window of free time.

We're lucky that he loves the game so much. We'll probably still get great stuff anyway!

 

That's fantastic news!

I thought they also made a motion capture studio in Austin for Star Citizen as well. I always wondered if Portalarium was going to use it.

 

It would be very cool if these could be put into some universal "rules" language akin to say musical notes so that I could represent an emote or dance as a string of letters and numbers. Then this could be played in any game cross platform.

 

I'd vote for an in-game way to piece together existing animations into custom emotes. You could take frames of existing animations and piece them together in new ways. Most combinations would probably be choppy and ugly and in no way a smooth animation. People might think the game was broken if they saw them. I would not expect anything anytime soon though, probably after Episode 1 at the earliest.

An initial implementation would be to link together multiple emotes into a string (e.g. build a dance sequence from available dance moves). From there you just provide smaller sets of animation frames that end in specific poses such that you could link them together in a more fluid manor. Eventually provide a lot of fine grained animations frames to play with.

I don't know how musical scores will make it in game, or what playing instruments will be like. I suspect if you build a new emote from pieces of existing animations that you could pay to have it implemented in game as a new emote (if approved). Or submit a new sequence as a player created asset.

These custom emotes could be teachable in the same way other teachable emotes would work.

Maybe an easier way to get them in game would be to have a macro system that lets you enter the various emotes in sequence. Then just use the macro to start up a dance sequence or something.