Smoother Animations v4

[taro8 806]

UPDATE!

v4 - current version

* I added a new inbetween animation for crouched movement with weapon up, in order to fix the massive jerking you experience when going from side to side.
* edited the weapon up running (not tactical pace) so it still shows the crosshairs, just something I found annoying. Now that stance has a reason to exist.

* added an OPTIONAL XEH script that increases the animation speed by 12.5% The addon is in the Optional folder. REQUIRES CBA!

 

v2.3

* NOW WORKING! edition. Thanks to the help of good folks at the arma discord I managed to fix all the bugs and errors. Hopefully it all works fine now.

 

v2.2

* fixed yet another fuckup with caused to you to ice skate around when you wanted to sprint. Sorry for the spotty release folks, it was hard to fish out all the stuff from that massive config and some stuff got broken in the process.

 

v2.1

* fixed massive fuckup I made, with pretty much prevented previous version from working at all

v2

The mod was completely redone from the ground up. Now it only edits the animations in places that needed the changes and no longer overwrites all of the vanilla animations. This means it should be compatible with any updates or changes BIS makes. I know its how it supposed to be from the start, but it was really time consuming and difficult to fish out the animations from the massive config file.

 

------

 

Hello!

I have been trying to make the arma animations feel a bit less rough and more in line with standard FPS feeling. I was partially successful, I changed the minimal play time requirement to 0 and enabled step blending for pretty much all movement animations. This resulted in much smoother feeling, especially when changing movement direction very quickly. For the most part the feeling of lost control for a moment is greatly reduced.

 

However one of the biggest issues remains. For some reason when changing movement direction from left to right, or similar, Arma goes like this:

left > stopped > stopped player idle > right

Its fast, but it still results in some pretty janky movement. I tried removing interpolation from left and right to stopped. It worked surprisingly well, but side movement interpolled into forward and back resulting with player character inching forward or back when stopping during side movement.

 

If anyone knows how to deal with that I would welcome any help.

 

DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ln87i6d8fonf8ms/@Smoother Animations v4.zip
 

Good news everyone!
After some hackjob animation editing I have managed to inject a custom transition animation that prevents that massive jerk when going from side to side. Currently testing out the settings to reduce any unwanted behavior, but it all looks very promising. I even made a quick preview/comparison video:
 

00:00 - 00:43 Vanilla Arma 3
00:44 - 01:24 Smoother animations mod testing

Massive shoutout and thanks to HorribleGoat and Torndeco from discord for helping me out with this.

 

[domokun 515]

Sounds great.

How about making a video comparing Before and After?

I'd be a great way to illustrate your progress.

[taro8 806]

I'm not a video guy. It's hard to show this in the video when you quickly change direction (say walking up stairs aiming back and such) and you lose control for a tiny moment. It feels clunky, but I don't think you can catch that in a video.

 

Feedback and opinions are welcome. If anyone would like to make a video, any help is welcome.

[ineptaphid 6413]

this is the thing that is so amazing about this game and this community. What other game exists where a player can decide "I don't like the quality of this game's animations. I think I will overhaul them" Fantasticc-looking forward to trying this out. :)

[taro8 806]

this is the thing that is so amazing about this game and this community. What other game exists where a player can decide "I don't like the quality of this game's animations. I think I will overhaul them" Fantasticc-looking forward to trying this out. :)

Skyrim and other Bethesda games? :P

Granted, Arma 3 is a bit more welcoming to modding than Skyrim, once you understand the configs you can do a LOT of stuff. Skyrim's indepth animation editing is fucking voodoo dark magic.  I also cooperate with CUP and learned how to work with Arma models as well.

 

I would love to get some more info on the odd behaviour that causes arma to go like this:

left > stopped > stopped player idle > right

 

This happens for every stance, if the transition between direction was smooth the janky feeling of movement would be gone for the most part.

[twisted 128]

wow, i was just commenting on the clunkiness and jerky feeling in the dev branch and then i see this. nice, going to try it out. Cheers

[Gwynbleidd 28]

Switching directions also causes a weird bug where your weapon sights get delayed, if you try to aim immediately after switching direction. For example, while moving forward, switch to forward+right, as soon as you add right, try aiming down the sights - you will see the guy do some weird dance with the weapon, delaying the aiming down sights.

If you have a launcher, and do the same thing from above (switch direction) and try to switch stance after switching direction (crouch or stand up), the game completely ignores you (doesn't switch your stance at all). Which got me killed few times when I was starting, until I learned it's safer to spam the button, than trust the game.

Here's the example of the delay:

(recorded a while ago for feedback tracker, that's why there are subtitles)

[Bnae 1431]

Sounds great and useful, something that i had in mind also

[taro8 806]

Switching directions also causes a weird bug where your weapon sights get delayed, if you try to aim immediately after switching direction. For example, while moving forward, switch to forward+right, as soon as you add right, try aiming down the sights - you will see the guy do some weird dance with the weapon, delaying the aiming down sights.

If you have a launcher, and do the same thing from above (switch direction) and try to switch stance after switching direction (crouch or stand up), the game completely ignores you (doesn't switch your stance at all). Which got me killed few times when I was starting, until I learned it's safer to spam the button, than trust the game.

Here's the example of the delay:

(recorded a while ago for feedback tracker, that's why there are subtitles)

 

I just tested it and indeed that is true. This is caused by the way arma blends animations. The changed direction has a highier priority than aiming stance change so it animates first, if you run around fast enough, you can delay aiming stance indefinitely. I will see if I can do anything about that.

[Megiddo 73]

Nice work, thanks for sharing :)

 

Been trying the mod since yesterday. The bugs you're talking about are present, indeed, but they're not a game breaker at all. Changing direction is still relatively quick, and if we're already in scope mode or ironsight view, the left->idle->right process is unnoticeable. Some more tweaks and it will do the job.

 

Hard to describe and give some feedback in english, but the movements and animations seem a bit more "squared". To picture things : In terms of gameplay, i always prefered the direct and squared animations from ARMA 2/OA, at least when it comes to lateral movements, so to say, strafing while walking or running and aiming. i always found them more precise and more sensitive. From this point of view, your tweaks are rubbing out a bit the soft and limp feeling vanilla animations have. maybe you cut some animation phases, changed their speed or else, but the feeling is more direct, i like it. Specially in 3rd person view.

 

Hope you'll keep improving your tweaks further. By the way, if retrieving the effectiveness of some of the good old OA animations is part of your goal, do you plan to make some tweaks :

 

- About running animations, specially when starting/stopping to run and changing directions while crounched. Same concern about the A3 animations. They're limp and kinda imprecise imo.

 

- About the acceleration/deceleration effects of the character : Here again, to emphasize on the inertia of the character while advantaging a better animation reactivity, specially when starting to run while stopped in stand up or crounching position. The same when the character stops with a deceleration effect.

 

- About the head bob : even at 100%, i find them very weak compared to OA ones. In terms of immersion, the old ones were better i think.

 

- About character rotations and the inertia of weapons : That's the big part. Don't know if this has to do with what you said about changing directions having a higher priority than aiming stance, but remember well, in OA when you were aiming somewhere (right, left, up or else with the mouse), your weapon movement seemed to have a little latency compared to the character turning/rotating animation itself. The priorities were maybe different, don't really know... It was really reactive and well done to give some sense of weight to your armaments, while ensuring a good feeling of homogeneous movement to your character. In comparison, today we have those little "on the spot" steps when the character rotates while stopped, that are breaking a good part of the aiming homogeneity by adding cosmetic, useless animations. Don't know if this is the same problem when the character is moving, but, do you have some latitude to try and tweak, speed up or even suppress completely those little steps the character does when he is rotating? Really hard to describe this in english, sorry, but i hope you got the idea.

 

 

Anyways, keep up the good work and thank you. those tweaks are already a good improvement for me.

[taro8 806]

snip

 

What I did was I set the minimal animation play time requirement to 0. Some animation had it at about 0.65. What it meant is that animation was required to play 65% of its length until it could be changed. Setting it to 0 allows other animations to immediately interrupt the current animation. I also allowed all directional movement to blend steps, it basically allows feet to slide on the ground in order to better blend animations. The blend steps is responsible for the effect you can see in some FPS's where you can see your own feet and they slide around when you make tiny steps.

 

In the end those changes allow animations to quickly switch from one to another, with results of feeling more in control of the motions.

 

The left->stopped->idle->right (this is how it really is done in the game) is most noticable on tactical crouch and rifle down run. I would love to get rid of that.

[Aniallator 164]

Holy god, you have no idea how happy I am to hear this. The aspect of Arma that annoys me most is the overall low quality of animations, even more than performance. Just a shame I don't have the know-how to be of any help, can't wait to see where this goes.

[taro8 806]

The animations are actually really good, only blending causes the movement to feel stiff and uncontrollable.

[twisted 128]

The animations are actually really good, only blending causes the movement to feel stiff and uncontrollable.

 

 

really? to me the jerkiness is bad. i took a break from arma 3 for a while, and coming back am surprised by how clunky it all feels.

 

there are micro stutters almost everywhere, almost as if the underlying animation or timing system is stuttering, like everything has a tiny pause every couple seconds, things dont feel smooth and even when you look at vehciles moving at full speed you can notice it. Goes way beyond character anuimantions but thats where its most obvious. even when watching others videos it is noticable, but when i spent so much time playing i got used to it, but now it really is noticable.

 

so thanks for your mod in helping make things a little better.

[domokun 515]

Will you be releasing this on Steam's Workshop?

[Megiddo 73]

What I did was I set the minimal animation play time requirement to 0. Some animation had it at about 0.65. What it meant is that animation was required to play 65% of its length until it could be changed. Setting it to 0 allows other animations to immediately interrupt the current animation. I also allowed all directional movement to blend steps, it basically allows feet to slide on the ground in order to better blend animations. The blend steps is responsible for the effect you can see in some FPS's where you can see your own feet and they slide around when you make tiny steps.

 

In the end those changes allow animations to quickly switch from one to another, with results of feeling more in control of the motions.

 

The left->stopped->idle->right (this is how it really is done in the game) is most noticable on tactical crouch and rifle down run. I would love to get rid of that.

 

Thanks for these useful explanations. It helps to see the process.

 

You clearly got what i meant, and i wanted to bring a precision, actually that's more a question, concerning those little steps and the consequences they have on both movements and aiming.

 

Too bad i'm neither a video guy, but i'll try to picture things once again.

 

Just stand still, immobile, with your character and take your pistol. In normal aiming stance, not iron sight. In first person view it's even more obvious. Then, simply rotate the character right or left with the mouse. At one point, the character is making the "little steps" we're talking about. The problem imo is that those little steps have a direct influence on the horizontal aiming line. At each step you can see that the gun, and even the entire character, is leaning right or left a little bit, and it breaks what i call the aiming line, its horizontal trajectory. Maybe it could be better if this light leaning was, either continuous, or not present at all, while we are rotating.

 

I think i understood what you meant about those blend steps and their effect on the animation sequences, the link between them, and the priorities you were refering to. Aside from the movement animations, is there a way to also influence their consequences on what i call, the clumsy way certainly, those aiming trajectories? Or are they completely tied to each other? some sort of axis matter or simply a chain of animations...

 

I don't have the knowledge for sure, but from the point of view of a simple player, it seems that those steps, when the character is immobile, walking, or even running and changing direction, have a negative effect on aiming (is it also tied to the scope bug?) and the global character reactivity when moving. At least, imo, compared to the simpler, but so reactive and precise animations we had in OA. 

 

Could be great if that was something you could somewhat influence the right way, too.

 

Thanks.

[taro8 806]

Sadly arma's animations are directly tied to the whole movement system, with includes aiming weapon and such. It's the design choice I guess. In normal FPS's you are just a camera floating around and even in games like Far Cry 4 the first person body is actually a cheat/fake. Arma is the only game that simulates player whole body even in first person.

 

I will try to improve it if I can. Personally I would make weapons be more stationary when up, I'm not sure if it would even be possible.

[taro8 806]

UPDATE!
v2 - current version

The mod was completely redone from the ground up. Now it only edits the animations in places that needed the changes and no longer overwrites all of the vanilla animations. This means it should be compatible with any updates or changes BIS makes. I know its how it supposed to be from the start, but it was really time consuming and difficult to fish out the animations from the massive config file.

[taro8 806]

UPDATE!

v2.3 - current version

* NOW WORKING! edition. Thanks to the help of good folks at the arma discord I managed to fix all the bugs and errors. Hopefully it all works fine now.

 

v2.2

* fixed yet another fuckup with caused to you to ice skate around when you wanted to sprint. Sorry for the spotty release folks, it was hard to fish out all the stuff from that massive config and some stuff got broken in the process.

 

v2.1

* fixed massive fuckup I made, with pretty much prevented previous version from working at all

 

EDIT: OH FFS! Turns out you cannot have the animations modded like any other config. For some bizzare reason it thros massive amount of errors.

[taro8 806]

Good news everyone!
After some hackjob animation editing I have managed to inject a custom transition animation that prevents that massive jerk when going from side to side. Currently testing out the settings to reduce any unwanted behavior, but it all looks very promising. I even made a quick preview/comparison video:
 

00:00 - 00:43 Vanilla Arma 3
00:44 - 01:24 Smoother animations mod testing

Massive shoutout and thanks to HorribleGoat and Torndeco from discord for helping me out with this.

[GordonWeedman 39]

This looks really neat! I was just wondering though, is this client side, or does it also have to be on the server?

[EDcase 87]

Looks great!

Can't wait to try it out...

[taro8 806]

I have a trouble with my transition animation causing me to go from kneel to standing tactical pace. It happens if I quickly press froward when the transition animation is playing. It doesn't happen if you press reverse key. There is no interpolation to the standing animation in my config. I have absolutely no idea why this is happening.

[alduric 10]

This needs to be on server or its fully 100% ClientSide mod?

[taro8 806]

UPDATE!

v4 - current version

* I added a new inbetween animation for crouched movement with weapon up, in order to fix the massive jerking you experience when going from side to side.
* edited the weapon up running (not tactical pace) so it still shows the crosshairs, just something I found annoying. Now that stance has a reason to exist.

* added an OPTIONAL XEH script that increases the animation speed by 12.5% The addon is in the Optional folder. REQUIRES CBA!

 

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ln87i6d8fonf8ms/@Smoother Animations v4.zip