Rather than sharing in the patch notes for 9.4, just going to post this in here.
I did previously have a discussion with Sirrian around animations, especially around when the Explore update was being released, so I poked at them again today about it… Because I couldn’t find my talk with them through all the messages I have sent about Explore and animations generally
Sharing this with the stipulation and understanding of, I don’t think this is going to change anyones opinions on animations, the reasons “behind” them being implemented etc, I just wanted to get something from Sirrian directly to share.
- Using the PUZZLE BOARD as an example:
- In general - a lot of the really weird bugs you see in battle are because of 4x speed mode and animation skipping.
- We’ll never take 4x animation speed away - obviously - but the lesson we learned from that is to put in animations and let them play out - allow skips on longer ones, never shorter ones.
- The nature of modern game engines is that you get some fairly complex time-related issues - something as simple as a match-3 game can be more complex than an FPS here, because of the strictly sequential nature of things - order of resolution becomes extremely important
- This gets exacerbated by three things:
- All the different spec/performance devices we need to operate on - some of which cause all sorts of timing issues
- 12 years of content and updates that get exponentially more difficult to test with each other and give the possibility of bad timing interactions
- The particular server model of GoW can be a bit sensitive to skipping ahead past server calls [again, a 12 year old game system]
- Our solution:
- Use unskippable animations to hide server calls
- Use animations sparingly to allow things to resolve in the background
- Allow skips where we can (e.g. reward lists, because these happen after an animation call)
- Just to reiterate
Animations are never added maliciously to slow anyone’s enjoyment
- They ARE added to improve stability and player experience - and they are always kept to a minimum
- Skipping is added wherever we can do so without the risk of more problems
Again, I don’t think this is going to change anyone’s opinions or theories, but I wanted to get a direct quote to share.
Also, this was after I specifically mentioned Explore, in case anyone reads this and assumes this whole comment is only about battle animations