Playthrough observations

[Chris]

Even in vanilla, the "dancing" idle animations (used in Desele's house of earthly delights) legitimately move the actor, as well.

By "moves the actor", I meant purposely ends at a different position than it started at, rather than being a math/movement roundoff error or something.

[onionland]

I'm not sure if saving animation state is a good idea in general. When you leave a cell and come back after days (or months) of game-time, you wouldn't expect the actor to be in the exact pose as when you left.

I honestly can't tell how that would be an issue, unless something is done to change the actor position intentionally I would say that having the animation state stay the same would be a good idea, having the animation state reset after loading a save is equally jarring, and yet I have yet to see someone complain about that.

But like I said, having the animation reset to give the illusion of time passing was likely not something intentionally implemented by Bethesda, and keeping that to the detriment of the project seems somewhat foolish.

If you want to do something the give the illusion of time passing, like for example changing up actor position, that should instead be a separate implementation that more easily can be controlled, and has no detrimental effects to other aspects of the engine.

[beta]

Speaking of realism, you should enhance the rain effect. Rain is only on you and like 1 meter diameter around you in game, it's really annoying when playing in third person.

[SquireNed]

No, because idle animations can legitimately move the actor (vanilla doesn't, but IIRC some custom creatures do).

Even in vanilla, the "dancing" idle animations (used in Desele's house of earthly delights) legitimately move the actor, as well.

I'm not sure if saving animation state is a good idea in general. When you leave a cell and come back after days (or months) of game-time, you wouldn't expect the actor to be in the exact pose as when you left.

Perhaps we could define a threshold value for correcting an actor's position, i.e. on unloading the cell, move the actor back its starting position if the idle animation moved them less than this threshold?

Again, the problem is that you'll have everyone start doing whatever they do after pausing when you enter. As far as immersion breakers, I don't think people will recognize the exact state of stuff in the cell anyway (typically you're looking at a door on your way out, right?).

[raevol]

Ok, a thought. The idle animations can move the character during the cycle of the animation, but do the idle animations all return the character to the origin when they finish? Because if not, the idle animations are legitimately making the characters migrate, and that's a problem. That is producing a bug that we should fix, even if it's deviating from vanilla behavior. I don't know why you would want NPCs migrating around in an uncontrolled fashion as the result of an animation that isn't really intended to move them through the world in the first place. People are mentioning the dancers in Suran, but do we really want them to migrate into the audience? Or into corners of the room?

I don't see why we can't save the idle animation state for NPCs that are in the same area as the player when the game is saved, and reload to that state and position when the game is loaded.

I also don't see why we can't reset the NPCs to their original position if all of these conditions are met:
- The player exits the cell
- The NPC is in an idle animation
- The only travelling the NPC has done from their default position is an idle animation

And when characters move from their default position for whatever reason, I know they are scripted to return to it after whatever event caused them to move- I've watched NPCs walk back to their origin after being charmed, for example. But if we're re-saving their origin position based on idle animation migration, that's a problem!

[Greendogo]

I'm not sure if saving animation state is a good idea in general. When you leave a cell and come back after days (or months) of game-time, you wouldn't expect the actor to be in the exact pose as when you left.

Perhaps we could define a threshold value for correcting an actor's position, i.e. on unloading the cell, move the actor back its starting position if the idle animation moved them less than this threshold?

Vanilla definitely didn't keep the NPCs in the exact same position.

I think the most important thing is to keep the NPCs on the defined walking paths when possible. If the walking grid is defined well, they will usually keep the NPCs on level surfaces. (Eventually we should replace walking grids with something like movement areas, in order to give the actors' more freedom of movement.)

[ezze]

Perhaps we could define a threshold value for correcting an actor's position, i.e. on unloading the cell, move the actor back its starting position if the idle animation moved them less than this threshold?

This idea sounds good, otherwise OpenMW needs a way to mark animations that are not expected to move the actor.

[Amenophis]

One of the best things in OpenMW is how the summonings work: Unlike vanilla, they start to fight in the moment the enemies are coming. Now a magical character can build a little army to defend himself: imagine a necromancer raising 6 skulls of fire while launching area venom clouds! I need a mod like this.

[Amenophis]

Another good thing: No More nude npcs when using BTB-Character. With Vanilla the guards in front of Tel Aruhn, Underground entrance walk nude, this don´t happen with OpenMW. Great feature!

[scrawl]

2- Sometimes I can't jump. I can't figure out what causes this, but if you play the game and jump everywhere, you'll start to notice this.

Should be fixed by pull 274.