Games w/ blinking eyes bring characters to life not zombie-like

Hi,
In DA2 I didn't see any eyes blinking from any characters including the main ones, except during cutscenes. I searched but didn't find any mods or discussions. Eyes blinking should be one of the most important parts of animation and immersion to really bring characters to life. Does DAO have blinking eyes or any other games you know?

Even crude animations made 60+ years ago have blinking eyes. Do you know why many sophisticated games don't include blinking eyes? It seems blinking eyes are less difficult but most important compare with many other animations that were made.

Please let us know what does it take to have blinking eyes, or how to mod?

See even simple emoticon can blink / wink :wink:


Thanks so much.

 

one stupid guess from me:

consoles don't have enough GPU power.

 

Thanks for your input Jeremy. I also meant PCs and consoles. It seems a simple eyes blinking, slight movement of eyes lids, maybe even only 2 frames toggle open / slightly closed, less cpu/gpu usage than the other more sophisticated, complex animations of many recent games.

Thanks.

 

I had never even thought about this before...

...thank you for ruining all gaming for me until this is fixed

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin it for anyone, as I thought it is very obvious. I think Lara blinks in recent Tomb Raiders, but ppl might not notice with their eyes glue (w/o blinking) on her other parts ;-) :wink:

See even simple emoticon can blink / wink :wink:
Thanks.

 

world of warcraft has blinking eyes, lolz.

 

Good Lord... O.O

Same here lol, I didn't give any attention to that detail, and now... Rawr... ._.

Also, nice question. Makes us all think.

I think the answer is simple : it's hard to do that. Why?

1st - Development time.
2nd - CPU power spent unecessarialy
3rd - Cost & time

It'd would take quite a while to create those animations. Then, they would need to calculate and process them individually for everyone in the game, at independent times, which would result in a noticeable CPU usage increase, and loss of it in really needed situations.

So yeah, it would be pointlessly expensive and costly for both CPU and GPU, for a feature that can be passed.

 

I'm thinking if they were going to add eye-blinks (aka, non-functional animation/rendering), why not add in

- Chest expansion and nostril flair during respiration?
- Hairs standing up on skin when they get goose bumps?
- Injuries that affect speed, introduce limp, and inability to walk, etc?

I think there is a line drawn at the moment they set a release date, because all details take time. I mean, I'd much rather see functional detals (aka, you jump off a building and can sprint away with 25% health VS. You jump off a building, and break your ankle so speed is reduced to 25% but your still not bleeding or anything).

 

EVE Online added blinking recently. It's damn annoying when you're creating a character.

 

Those effects are so "small" yet so hard to do. Besides, that would take an insane amount of GPU processing, namely hair details. Imagine around at least 500 hairs in each character, processed independetly, in a 20 character scene? It would require a really really top of the lime GPU.

 

That was exactly my point. If you're going to take the time to do eye blinks....why not take the time to do hair, and breathing, and this and that....and then by time you release the game, it will be 10 year old technology.

 

lol blinking eyes is easy your taking to something totally different that really is no comparison.

games that are 10 years old have had eye blinking.

 

Yeah, but there is a difference between scripted eye blinking and dynamic eye blinking, which is what we're talking about here.

 

Thanks all. I meant even the simplest form of in game blinking w/ just two fixed frames (open / close) would greatly help.

Vicious and anyone else: which older games do you remember had blinking?

I think I remember: Jade Empire also by Bioware 2005, which is why I was sad that 2011 DX11 didn't ;-(
TR Legend 2006 and later
Mass Effect ?


It seems a simple eyes blinking, slight movement of eyes lids, maybe even only 2 frames toggle open / slightly closed, less cpu/gpu usage than the other more sophisticated, complex animations of many recent games. There are already many non-functional animations when characters stand idle: stretching, moving just about all body parts, except eyes.

Thanks.

 

Like the first operation flashpoint? As for the rest those are details that are not easily noticed on a real human. Game developers are targeting more lifelike facial expressions like in LA Noire for example. How hard would it be to set the animation on a variable timer?

 

never noticed. wont notice. dont really care. ideally, it would be nice, but at a certain point too much attention to detail means longer development cycles, and less focus on gameplay which is what counts.

small effects are incredibly hard to do rendering wise, because while it seems simple you have to deal with hundreds of polygons in a small area, which actually need to be expanded to more polygons to make it look realistic and not alien. its far less noticeable to not blink than to blink really strangly.

 

not sure why people think blinking eyes are computationally hard...its a shader effect, unless maybe you're playing like a biology learning game or something where they would have to include thickness, and fluid effects.

hair on the other hand is very computationally difficult. there is quite a bit of geometry involved(curves, unevenness, etc.) as well as the sheer number of hairs that you need to render at once. moreso cause of the sheer amount though.

EDIT: adding dynamic timers to run static animations is not a concern in the slightest. REALLY not sure where this thought came from.

 

Blinking eyes is as hard or as easy as you want it to be. It could be as simple as shading in the eye as a skin colour or all the way to having a whole polygon eyelid. Making it work across all characters wouldn't be much of a problem either since game development is mostly modular and animations are re-used everywhere (ie generic walk animations). Making OK blink movements wouldn't be too difficult either since it's just an addition to the game AI, though it might have a small CPU time toll. Here's a simple example in horrendous pseudocode (yes, it is pascal based if you were wondering).

var sec:integer;

repeat
if suddennoise then blink;
if brightlight then closeeyes(intensity);
if (rand(8)=0 and sec>=3) then
begin
blink;
sec:=0;
end;
inc(sec);
sleep(1000);

EDIT: Damn you, vBulletin for taking out my indentation!

That should make an OK approximation of blinking realistically. As proven, it's not going to be that hard for game developers to implement blinking properly, just that they can't be bothered.

As for things like goosebumps, while rendering the actual hairs would be a nightmare, you could add a bump map over the players skin which gradually fades in and out with the players simulated fear level. That would be a good approximation of goosebumps which wouldn't chew through excessive amounts of computing power (bump mapping is fairly cheap for what you can pull off with it).

 

I was marveled the first time I saw game characters breath (chest expansion). I think it was in Rainbow Six. Characters not blinking bother me too. I loose a lot of the immersion factor with that.