ACU Walk Animations – Adjustments as a Test Mod

[Tokyto_]

I have tested a few days ago. You've done a great job, especially the Cybran ACU with its head animation. I will test further on a better PC later this week.

[Saver]

Good evening everyone,

I'd like to try a new approach to gathering feedback on my projects. To do so, I contacted the YouTube caster The Commissar and asked him to create a video about this project.

My goal is not only to gather feedback on the updated walking animations, but also to find out what you think of this approach and whether you could imagine us using it for other projects in the future.

So, feel free to share your thoughts, either here on the forum or directly under the video! I'm looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.

And as always, have fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoaYoHiaRuU

@ The Commisar - big Thanks again!

[Saver]

Hello everyone,

Since I would now like to consider this small project finished, I wanted to share a few final thoughts.

First of all, thank you very much for all the interesting comments under The Commissar's video!

The feedback and impressions were very diverse and highlighted many different perspectives. Some of them even brought up aspects I hadn't considered myself. This is exactly what makes community feedback so valuable.

Conclusion of the original project

I consider the original project – the improvements to the ACU walk animations – officially complete. I will keep the changes exclusively as a mod addition within my mod pack. I do not plan any further development or integration into the base game.

However, what I would particularly like to highlight is the way this project was presented.

I deliberately wanted to try different approaches to reach as many members of the community as possible and gather a wider range of opinions and feedback.

One of the reasons for this was my experience with the previous factory model project, where my approach and the opportunities for community participation apparently weren't equally clear to everyone.

Therefore, I decided to try several different communication channels for this smaller project (excluding a direct presentation on Discord).

Here is a brief summary of the results:

GitHub – 8 weeks of testing

I initially presented the project as a Pull Request on GitHub. Although I received some feedback, it was limited to two testers. There were also a few short clips included directly in the project.

Results:
Views: 2 / Responses: 2

FAF Forum – 6 weeks of testing

To encourage greater participation and gather more opinions, I subsequently presented the project here on the forum.

Results:
Views: 157 / Responses: 5

YouTube video – 1 week of testing

As a third approach, I asked The Commissar to create a video about the project.

In my opinion, the advantage of a video is that changes and their effects can be demonstrated quickly and clearly. This may also make it easier for people who aren't directly involved in the project to form their own opinions.

Results:
Views: 530 / Responses: 16

Final thoughts

I hope this small experiment has demonstrated some of the possibilities for improving communication with the community in the future.

Especially when it comes to changes and new ideas, it's important to gather as many different opinions as possible. Not only to identify potential improvements, but also to collect new suggestions and perspectives.

My personal conclusion is that it can definitely be worthwhile to explore alternatives to the traditional forum approach when presenting projects. Of course, this was only a small experiment and not a universal solution. Nevertheless, I hope that my experience might be useful for future projects or other proposed changes.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to look at the project and share their thoughts!

I wish you all the best and hope you have a great time!

[HotCheeseInRear]

This post is deleted!

[HotCheeseInRear]

@Saver Loved the animations and your factory work. Shame its wrapped up.

As an aside. Has there been any consideration to expand the white list of "sim safe" .bp values to change? It seems like plenty of fields (LOD cut off, HP bar size, selection size, selection priority) are all desync/sim safe. And could be exposed to UI mods similar to the way strategic icons are.

If animations are sim safe, users could have whichever animation or mix animations they like. Its just a shame that someone like Saver has to climb a mountain to get his work integrated. When users would 100% pick and choose which of Saver's animations they like if it were enabled as a UI mod.

[Nomander]

Animations are not safe because they modify bone positions and thus things like transport attachment position or projectile creation position.

[Saver]

@nomander
I only partially agree with you. Of course, the bones of a model move differently during an animation. However, these changes are limited strictly to the movement itself. The overall arrangement of the bones within the model remains unchanged.

To give you a concrete example from my own work: I use the game's original standard models and have only adjusted the poses within the animations.

Here is an image that I hope illustrates what I mean:

However, a mod like this could potentially be used or perceived as a kind of cheat, even unintentionally.

The reason is that this change does not only affect a unit's animation file. It also requires modifying the playback speed in the unit's Blueprint file. This means that a merge is necessary. During this process, other values in the unit's Blueprint could also be changed, either intentionally or unintentionally, which is not desirable.

As a consequence, mods of this kind would always need to be reviewed before they could be used in the regular game.

[Saver]

@HotCheeseInRear First of all, thank you very much! I'm really glad to hear that.

I also gave some more thought to your idea of creating a kind of Skin Mod. However, the restrictions involved, as described above, could open the door to unwanted changes to the game.

In this case, we're only talking about an animation that doesn't significantly affect a unit's visual appearance. Nevertheless, under FAF's current and entirely understandable rules, this kind of modification is not permitted in regular matches.

If the FAF team were to explicitly approve this approach, I could subsequently create individual mods for each ACU, which could then essentially be classified as UI mods. However, under the current rules, this isn't an option.

I think the FAF team already has much more important things to focus on at the moment, such as further engine development and the upcoming patches. And that's great to see!

Thanks again for the great suggestion!

[Nomander]

What I meant is that since it modifies the bone positions even slightly, it probably eventually causes desyncs if two players have different animations. It's not a big gameplay difference in your animation example, but it's a potential desync so it can't be allowed. To relate back to cheese's post, you can't have "users could have whichever animation or mix animations they like," it would be limited to what FAF implements and officially distributes.

[HotCheeseInRear]

Okay animations aren't safe. But things like LOD cut off and HP bar size are almost certainly replay/desync safe. And could potentially be exposed for UI modding

[Saver]

@nomander Thank you for your feedback and for explaining your point. I just want to avoid any misunderstandings

@all
If anyone likes these animations or wants to create their own variations based on them, they are welcome to use the files freely. Everyone is free to use these as a starting point for their own work.