Character animation smoothness of Fallen Angel demo vs. Gold edition

[SlashExit 2]

Recently I was looking for an ARPG to play and remembered having fun with Sacred 2 back in the days. I first downloaded and played the Fallen Angel demo again before actually grabbing the Gold edition on GOG.

One thing I quickly noticed after going from the Fallen Angel demo to the final game (Gold edition):
The animation transitions of the player character are substantially smoother in the Fallen Angel demo than in the Gold edition (mainly tested with Seraphim).

For example, when the character is swinging the weapon and reverts to standing pose, in the demo the character's limbs all visibly move back to the standing position smoothly. Whereas in the Gold edition, after the swinging animation ends, the 3D model simply resets to the standing position immediately, making the animation look choppy. Like in these old 2D games with pre-rendered character sprites.
This applies to almost all player animations such as shooting, casting buffs, swinging weapons in different directions. Whenever an animation sequence ends, the transition (or lack thereof) to the previous/next pose looks abrupt/choppy.
I was a bit disappointed realizing the animation smoothness from the demo is gone in the final game and was surprised how those little details actually made the demo look way more polished to me. I tried with and without Community Patch, but it made no difference.

Does anyone know why that is? Did they sacrifice the transition rendering in favor of tighter casting/attacking timings?

I wonder if there is a setting for optionsCustom.txt to revert to the old rendering or if a mod would be able to restore it.

[Flix 5,116]

Hello and welcome.

Yes, it looks like garbage and the cause is the Community Patch.  We (devs) were not in full agreement on the matter but it was a "solution" that ended up going in for an issue with the Inquisitor's animations, as well as ranged weapon projectiles firing off before the weapon was even raised.  @dimitrius154 could probably explain better.

Reinstall the Gold edition and it should be reverted.  The CM disabler is imperfect, I believe it does not remove all the altered files from the system folder, because there was so much difference between disk/GOG/Steam editions it could not be made to handle all 3 versions.

[dimitrius154 612]

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Yes, it looks like garbage and the cause is the Community Patch.  We (devs) were not in full agreement on the matter but it was a "solution" that ended up going in for an issue with the Inquisitor's animations, as well as ranged weapon projectiles firing off before the weapon was even raised. 

The animation blending debacle is a result of bad animation decisions on the part of our predecessors, the Ascaron developers(yeah, I know, it's a cheap shot to blame things on predecessors). They've decided to solve the cape and robe flowing through vertex animation. It used to be a popular solution for low-graphics games. It's unfit for Sacred 2 due to:

• The way the Sacred 2 memory manager operates - every animation file weighting as a model proper you get to the 2GB limit pretty fast.
• No transition breakpoints - there's no blending procedure for vertex animated models, no way to control the display.
• The idiotic "hanger effect" - just try equipping a different robe on the Inquisitor, while the stash is open(just one of several instances of the bug).

In order to mitigate the effect, the blending time had to be reduced to 0.01 sec. The more palatable soluton has not been available until the Addendum Beta(where I've thrown the vertex animation out of the window, without opening it first).

Edited October 3, 2020 by dimitrius154

[SlashExit 2]

Thank you for your elaborate answers guys!

 

2 hours ago, Flix said:

Reinstall the Gold edition and it should be reverted.  The CM disabler is imperfect, I believe it does not remove all the altered files from the system folder, because there was so much difference between disk/GOG/Steam editions it could not be made to handle all 3 versions.

Oh that makes sense! This explains why I thought the unpatched game was also affected. I didn't start playing the full game without the Community Patch but later simply used the disabler tool of the Community Patch to check if the patch is the root cause - not knowing it doesn't completely disable the patch. Thanks for clearing this up!

I just did a clean reinstall of the Gold edition: lo and behold, the animation transitions are back in full glory!

 

43 minutes ago, dimitrius154 said:

In order to mitigate the effect, the blending time had to be reduced to 0.01 sec. The more palatable soluton has not been available until the Addendum Beta(where I've thrown the vertex animation out of the window, without opening it first).

@dimitrius154 thanks for the technical insights! How does this blending time adjustment of the patch work? - is it compiled deeply into the files somewhere or would there be a way to edit this myself so I could keep all the other Community Patch fixes while reverting the blending time/behavior to that of the base game?

[dimitrius154 612]

16 minutes ago, SlashExit said:

is it compiled deeply into the files somewhere

Two code instances - one in s2logic.dll, one in s2render.dll. 

[SlashExit 2]

10 minutes ago, dimitrius154 said:

Two code instances - one in s2logic.dll, one in s2render.dll. 

Thank you. Replacing those files with the unpatched ones like

states, it reverts the animations but breaks BFG on an existing save games.

I assume there is no publicly available toolkit for modding the patch DLLs? (aside from a Hex editor, which I'm not that experienced with...)

[dimitrius154 612]

11 minutes ago, SlashExit said:

I assume there is no publicly available toolkit for modding the patch DLLs?

There's no Sacred 2 disassembler guide, I'm afraid. Just like there's no manual for the process of becoming a lich.

"Because, if everyone could do it, those, who've done all the work, would not seem so smart, now would they?")))

[lacr 60]

7 hours ago, Flix said:

Hello and welcome.

Yes, it looks like garbage and the cause is the Community Patch.  We (devs) were not in full agreement on the matter but it was a "solution" that ended up going in for an issue with the Inquisitor's animations, as well as ranged weapon projectiles firing off before the weapon was even raised.  @dimitrius154 could probably explain better.

Reinstall the Gold edition and it should be reverted.  The CM disabler is imperfect, I believe it does not remove all the altered files from the system folder, because there was so much difference between disk/GOG/Steam editions it could not be made to handle all 3 versions.

May we, by the way, humbly ask you to include in your future S2EE an optional "mod" with the original blending time? this is indeed a very questionable tradeoff

[Flix 5,116]

24 minutes ago, lacr said:

May we, by the way, humbly ask you to include in your future S2EE an optional "mod" with the original blending time? this is indeed a very questionable tradeoff

If I could do that it would have been part of the main mod effective immediately.  Alas, I am not a yet a full-fledged wizard who can disassemble and reassemble code.  I would have to copy the aforementioned s2logic.dll and s2render.dll files directly from Addendum, which would in turn bring over a lot of changes I'm reluctant to add to the mod.  We've yet to hash that out.

I could substitute the vanilla binaries, but that would cause the loss of several other fixes from CM 1.60.  Those two files control much more than just animation blending.

[lacr 60]

6 minutes ago, Flix said:

If I could do that it would have been part of the main mod effective immediately

In that case I must to beg your pardon, I saw that EE modifies s2logic.dll and thought that you have hexpatches for each fix