The singularity equip animation is longer than other gun skins. Although you can shoot prior to the animation finishing, it's still confusing in the heat of battle. I have attached a video (https://streamable.com/07mnjf) showing the difference between the singularity equip and the ion phantom equip.
External link →Hey, all! It's Sunday night, so the cosmetics dev team is enjoying their weekend. I'm going to have them take a look at this tomorrow to investigate when we're at work.
If this is an issue (even though OP says you can actually shoot before the anim "completes"), please trust us that it was unintentional and we'll try to fix it. We never intend to make things pay-to-lose or pay-to-win.
If it's not actually an issue after we investigate (some of you below have pointed out the videos aren't side-by-side, so some of this might just be "feel"), thanks for still reporting it. We make these skins for all of you and we honestly do appreciate bug reports, general feedback, and "feel" type feedback we get. This is why custom anims are very tricky--it can be the same exact timing but sometimes "feel" slower, or even "feel" faster. We test extensively for this, but sometimes we will screw it up. Not saying we did here YET (still gotta look at this with the team)!
In general, we're making this game for you all and with you all, so thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt. It's hard shipping a live game. It's even harder during a pandemic when we're all isolated from each other. So thanks for being on this journey with us so early on and helping us get it right.
Hey, all! It's Sunday night, so the cosmetics dev team is enjoying their weekend. I'm going to have them take a look at this tomorrow to investigate when we're at work.
If this is an issue (even though OP says you can actually shoot before the anim "completes"), please trust us that it was unintentional and we'll try to fix it. We never intend to make things pay-to-lose or pay-to-win.
If it's not actually an issue after we investigate (some of you below have pointed out the videos aren't side-by-side, so some of this might just be "feel"), thanks for still reporting it. We make these skins for all of you and we honestly do appreciate bug reports, general feedback, and "feel" type feedback we get. This is why custom anims are very tricky--it can be the same exact timing but sometimes "feel" slower, or even "feel" faster. We test extensively for this, but sometimes we will screw it up. Not saying we did here YET (still gotta look at this with the team)!
In general, we're making this game for you all and with you all, so thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt. It's hard shipping a live game. It's even harder during a pandemic when we're all isolated from each other. So thanks for being on this journey with us so early on and helping us get it right.
!pin
Thank you for taking your time to look at it!! Love the work you're doing with the skins :)
If there is/isnt a problem, would it be possible to let us know before patch notes drop?
<3 No worries. We hate when you all feel bad about stuff. Like actually feel super bad. This job is a passion, so we all take it to heart. :(
Yup, I'll provide an update when I have one. I don't know if it'll make it to patch notes since that takes localization time (it has to be translated into lots of languages), but I can post a reply to this thread at the very least. Investigation can take a little while though, so don't be surprised if I don't have an update right away.
<3 No worries. We hate when you all feel bad about stuff. Like actually feel super bad. This job is a passion, so we all take it to heart. :(
Yup, I'll provide an update when I have one. I don't know if it'll make it to patch notes since that takes localization time (it has to be translated into lots of languages), but I can post a reply to this thread at the very least. Investigation can take a little while though, so don't be surprised if I don't have an update right away.
u/Asomboy4 i took a quick look at your video, cropped out both sections and displayed them ontop of one another. On first look the timing of them are pretty close, with some minor differences being caused by the floating rocks on Singularity. i tried to get both to show their first frame of equip, or rather the first frame available after your knife is gone, and I noticed each Ion equip had you firing almost immediately making it difficult to capture the true end of that base equip. I'll take a look more in depth tomorrow at the files themselves to confirm.
Here is the video of them both displayed at the same time
u/Asomboy4 i took a quick look at your video, cropped out both sections and displayed them ontop of one another. On first look the timing of them are pretty close, with some minor differences being caused by the floating rocks on Singularity. i tried to get both to show their first frame of equip, or rather the first frame available after your knife is gone, and I noticed each Ion equip had you firing almost immediately making it difficult to capture the true end of that base equip. I'll take a look more in depth tomorrow at the files themselves to confirm.
Here is the video of them both displayed at the same time
!pin
Huh that's interesting. I noticed there being a "cut" in the animation if you hold down fire with the singularity phantom. Is this intentional?
yeah technically all weapons can be fired ever so slightly be fore the equip or reload animation is done. it may vary from weapon to weapon but if you try it on most automatic weapons you'll see a pop thatll probably cut off the last 10ish frames of the animation. its a bit of wiggle room that allows some flexibility for a player to feel it out (roughly the gun is steady)
Hey so I went ahead and re-recorded the video. I also found a video editor (but it put a damn watermark over the video, hopefully it's still readable)
The equip animation looks to be on par with the default skin. However, I think the issue becomes more apparent when you hold down "fire" when equipping the rifle:
It leads me to believe that instead of the animation being longer, it's just not communicated properly as to when you can shoot, as seen in the 3rd last frame - the default phantom is primed and ready while the singularity still looks like it's forming.
On a separate note, the "black hole" appears two frames before the actual bullet is fired, and jumps to the muzzle.
On your last note, where the black hole is appearing is the position of the gun where its fired first, but the animation pop is so fierce that it moves the gun basically one frame after it fires. You can actually see an extreme example of this if you fire your gun during the 2nd half of an inspect when the muzzle is all the way on the left side of your screen.
Thanks for the best skins you make. 100% Elderflame fan:)) looking forward to other skin bundles
Aw, glad to hear you love Elderflame. :) It was the toughest skin we made so I'm really glad that players seem to like it. Was fun seeing it used in the NA First Strike finals this weekend.
It's truly marvelous how great minds are being combined in order to deliver such a finesse skins! Can't wait for the next release skin lines <3 have a great day!
The team is brilliant! :) I'm also excited to show off the new skins!
if this is true you guys should really consider culling all animations by ten frames. that is completely counter-intuitive and an unnecessary burden of knowledge that isnt a reflection of mechanical skill. almost like a bad trivia question.
also id like to apologize for the tone of my popular post in here. if anims are 10 frames long across the board this definitely pushes the issue from bad animation work to questionable animation decision making in visuals vs clarity
its not actually 10 frames, i was generalizing. there is buffer room on all readying animations and the amount of frames varies. Very early on we've had situations where firing is locked to exactly the frame that he animation ends and what we found through playtests is that you typically anticipate that moment and start to fire just before it happens, which resulted in lots of frustration around not being able to fire when your gun feels ready to fire, so we included this buffer to allow you a bit of forgiveness in each action
youre probably completely right here, ive never developed an fps, making this an unnecessarily magnified issue. i just know how quickly misinformation spreads and like, perception of action is valued. i know wolfenstein enemy territory devs had to dampen the audio of one sides starting gun from nonstop complaints of it being OP when they had identical stats. the gun just literally sounded more bad ass lmao. the inconsistency between the skinless, ready to fire anim (which i cant say ive personally ever felt didnt fire when it felt 'ready' but again, anecdotal small data bullshit) and singularity skin shown in this example just you know, feels bad and looks like shoddy work.
im gonna defer to your input on it, being involved in the process and privy to the feedback, but just like, i guess the inconsistency is the issue. i think deciding on one approach and conducting a normalizing pass with a simple explanation in patch notes would be best. but again, the f**k do i know i could be a dog on the internet
i appreciate you replying and giving this valuable information on this. this whole thread is one huge f**kin misunderstanding lmao
So I definitely understand the perception difference. Here's where I'm seeing a similarity with regard to what could be causing a that . I loaded up the raw animation files and screenshotted them on their exact frames from maya to ensure I was capturing from exactly the same moment.
Both animations are exactly 99 frames by the way.
Like I mentioned from seeing the original video, around frame 60 where the player puts their hands on the gun matches up - this should be roughly the moment your hands are on the gun where you should be able to fire from, Typically what we aim for is the hands being the thing that indicate your weapon's readiness as opposed to the gun itself, this allows us to create unique equips like we have done on this set and Elderflame for example.
We did test this equip, as well as a reload for a long time internally with developers and externally with players (before we launched the game), and our number one priority was ensuring that competitive integrity was not compromised in any way. We found some things toward the end that did, and ultimately cut those as features from the skinline. Through all of our testing there were no issues seen across the board with regard to timing on the equips or reloads.u/Asomboy4
Thank you for taking your time to look at it!! Love the work you're doing with the skins :)
If there is/isnt a problem, would it be possible to let us know before patch notes drop?
Sean (oniram) responded below! :)
totally see what youre saying here and see it exactly as you mention. singularity definitely still downwards, causing that anim to snap into fire state.
looks like maybe a frame off, bummer to create such a stink.
i noted some of your other animation tendencies too. like how tightening of bloom / recoil reset ends when your anim state is roughly back in idle, really helps with the sheriff in my peripheral. it seems like a such a simple thing but its actually helpful lol.
im at least glad some clarity came from this thread and we could have a conversation. whatever solution you guys end up on will work im sure, it appears that you arent just pissin in the wind as i originally believed.
hey idk if youre under nda for it, but can you mention any skin features that needed to be cut for providing an edge? im super curious into how they could. if u cant, understandable
no problem. also glad we could have the conversation. naturally any instance that would give someone an advantage or disadvantage is something we're super cautious about so it was worth looking into.
for the feature that was cut on the Singularity weapons, we talked about this in a discussion with Forbes that ill link here. But tldr:
The gun would jitter every now and then. We wanted it to show some instability even when idle, so the rocks would sort of shift back/forth & up/down randomly as if they were trying to pull themselves away from the core but the core kept pulling it back.
We did that probably sometime late last year and were ok with it, but in the month or so before we launched we reviewed and it actually came up as being a distraction. The team made the decision to remove that to avoid distraction saying also that the skin did not gain or lose anything from having this feature or not.
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