Mark Rein On Project Natal

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hal

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Mark Rein talks to OXM about Unreal Engine 3 and Project Natal, declaring UE3 to be the "unofficial engine of Natal" and that Natal will likely incorporated into any of their future Xbox games. (thanks, dub) Here he talks about mapping player motions to canned animation with Natal/UE3.

That's always going to be the challenge with a real-time motion system, to track the motion and keep the animation on the body believable. That was actually one of the technologies that Microsoft built, this idea of mapping the physical motion that you are doing to the actual motion you want the Avatar to display.

It doesn't always look how you expect. In other words, when you see someone throw a baseball, you've seen it hundreds of times before on TV, so you know how it should really look. Well, we aren't all professional baseball players. How many times have you heard someone say, "Oh, he throws like a girl!" Because there's some really weird, very simple motion or something. Now you don't want to see your character doing that, instead you want to see your character being the best pitcher in the major leagues. And that's one of things it can do, it can map that.

You can actually have the arm do a realistic motion of what you are doing, while the body goes through an animated, or procedural animation. We have that system in Unreal where you can blend different animations, so you can have a ragdoll effect on a leg, a running animation on an arm, a turning animation on the head. Microsoft has taken that one step further and does the mapping as well. So you can have a part of the body that's mapped, whereas another part is procedural.

Throws like a girl? Oh no he di'n't!
 

Jetfire

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I believe the Wii is limited to 2d input where Natal isn't. However time will tell, I'm naturally skeptical of these kinds of things but one day someone will crack it.
 

-Jes-

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If Natal is seriously going to work as they say..

Then it'll be a BIT more serious in the market than the waggling sticks of the Wii and Ps3. :eek:
 

Sir_Brizz

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This would more likely be used for QTEs than any actual gameplay.
 

Phopojijo

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So what's the motion for shock combo?

ASMD Shock Rifle? The one on the right...

dx.JPG
 

Kantham

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It wants me to install Microsoft Silverlight on their Microsoft site to watch videos and pictures. Good Game.
 

Hedge-o-Matic

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"so you can have a ragdoll effect on a leg, a running animation on an arm, a turning animation on the head"

And thus achieve the look of a total dipsh!t. High tech!
 

Phopojijo

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It wants me to install Microsoft Silverlight on their Microsoft site to watch videos and pictures. Good Game.
Until Adobe steps up their game... which apparently they're doing in the next version but that's irrelevant... Silverlight is actually the better technology right now it seems.
 

{Ogre}Spin

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While I agree that natal seems gimmicky, I'm not going to dismiss it. I still recall sir clifford of B himself being made to look a bit of a nonce for dismissing the wii and look where that stands now (more popular than cheese!).

I can't see any way that an FPS would be improved by this tech, but that's not the point, it's more what can be done which we can't do with current stuff. It is in these areas that innovation is likely to take place.

The other thing about this tech, is that that like the wii, for every success there will be a dozen badly implemented ideas where the developers try to 'bolt on' the tech to existing game ideas (see the bloody awful donkey kong racer game among SO many others).
 

Phopojijo

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The Wii isn't necessarily a success -- the disillusionment from the Core audience that Nintendo had since the Gamecube carried over and intensified to the Wii. Most of the casual audience barely bought extra games.

When Nintendo will need to go back to selling systems at a loss, they will not see the profits they had. They lucked out that they could sell the Wii, at all times, at a profit.

**That Said**

Now of course you can also consider Microsoft not winning either because of all the money they threw at the 360 not looking like it'll be recovered in ANY reasonable time frame. They, however, succeeded in getting a product of theirs into the average person's living room... which they consider a success.

Sony also threw a large portion of money out the window too... but they somewhat succeeded into pushing BluRay... ... somewhat... I guess?

The PC lost a lot of market share... suffered a good blow due to laptops, netbooks, people's opinions of Vista, consoles finally switching to HD (sort-of... ... many games really don't even though they say they do... <3 "1080p game" with a 540p framebuffer), and the Mac.

So yeah... <shrugs>
 
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Sir_Brizz

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Nobody is winning, but Wii has pretty poor software sales. They obviously have no regard for WHAT gets released on their console as the vast majority of the game are so horrendous that they don't even get reviewed.
 

Kantham

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I'm not installing their own software they force us in order to watch videos and pictures. Or did I really miss something about silverlight that is really outstanding for displaying videos/pictures?

Until Adobe steps up their game... which apparently they're doing in the next version but that's irrelevant... Silverlight is actually the better technology right now it seems.

Whew.. at least Google doesn't force us to use Chrome in order to have a search result!
 
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