This post is written to disilusion some people who may have been bamboozled by CCP Vegas graphics panel presentation.
If you have seen what CCP demoed at the scene in EVE Vegas, you may think “Cute, avatars will finally get some stage time in the game, finally they are bringing Aura into the game as avatar. Nice, she will even talk to you and make jokes about your incompetence maybe”.
Do you think CCP thinks this will make game more enjoyable when you will see animated NPC character instead of static one? Can you provide a reason why do we need NPCs talking to us waving hands helplessly, instead of our avatars purposefully shooting other avatars in the face for slight offence like in PvP game it is supposed to be? What about DUST 514 port to PC?
What about your own avatar in EVE now? It doesnt get much stage for an RPG MMO, isnt voiced, You cant get it to “say” anything, there isnt even one dialog line of conversation with NPC in this game when your character “says” anything.
Its all about player interaction, NPCs are just ISK printing machine system part.
So dont get your hopes up this avatar change will change anything. Put the pitchforks away too. There is no way CCP will get out of the player interaction ditch they digged out thru many years, with some small part time NPC animated portrait work. When there will be not enough interaction between players characters, some NPC portraits will change nothing. As of now there was no talks and demos about multiplayer avatar environments since Incarna. By means of socialization, CCP is stuck back in 2003 with EVE.
Actually why not update nebulas, or spaceships or planets graphics for nth time. You see them more often than you ever cared and paid attention to npc portraits probably. These scenery updates were always welcomed as I remember.
costumes for aura when ?
sexy costumes for all avatars when ?
repair pets when? and loot boxys when ?
golden ammo when ?
concord protection from gankers when ?
own 0.0 rent direct from ccp when ?
In the long run (assuming EVE has a long run), CCP needs to make EVE more appealing to more players, find ways to catch interest in the first few hours, and also find ways to increase monetization avenues without making the game even more P2W than it already is.
For a long time, EVE has lost out competitively against games with more interesting, more interactive graphics. They’ve also missed out on a big “interest grabbing” feature without cut-scenes or animated graphics. The minimal use of character portraits in game means cosmetics and skins are a much lower sales opportunity in EVE than they are in other games.
I can’t personally say that better avatars will do much for the game, especially considering that I expect CCP to pull a “Walking in Stations” here: interesting hype, botched implementation.
Still, it’s almost 2020 and the gaming market has moved on. Static head-shots and virtually no animation doesn’t cut it in today’s market. If CCP could manage to integrate more interesting graphics into the game in an engaging manner, it at least won’t hurt.
Unless of course they ignore all the things that really need to be fixed about EVE, because, hey, avatars!
It is rather do we go this way and redo the NPC avatars, or we stick to the space stuff like before, that worked for many years prior.
I think it will be abandoned eventually in fact…
Considering that such a small improvement like mixing races of our characters never came into the game despite being demoed and working on one of the fanfests, same with those station establishments that never came to life.
My impression is CCP does all those things to demo to themselves actually, and then it gets abandoned because there are more important things or people are fired because no cash.
There is still no environment to tie everything in the game, no dev tools are build for avatars enviornments, and ending up hardcoded is the thing of past everywhere.
Systematic updates to game engine in form of creation tools is where they failed thru many years.
While I can make a space home for myself in another virtual world like Sansar, in few weeks, for free
For starters there is no “cockpit” in EvE…
Unless you are talking about using fighters instead of ships.
There is a bridge of course, but then you have to get out of your pod…
Which means you lose all the cool advantages as a capsuleer, unable to control your ship directly.
And when it blows…guess what? Perma death thats what.
Quite possible to see how it behaves in a mass setting then on to bigger project perhaps, often this is a way to keep feeding over time without dumping all the goods at once, as far as people even with a banquet put in front of them they will not be happy (human nature).
They found out that the tutorial with speaking helpers waa actually less helpful than the older tutorial of just sending players to career agents.
So they are trying to redo the tutorial…so all that voice acting and the time and money put into it? No longer useful. And that’s the issue I’ve been trying to remind people about voice acting. It’s expensive and cannot be easily edited.
It’s not like text where literally anyone can open the program, delete a few lines and add some more. It takes maybe 5 minutes.
If you want to do voice acting you have to find the voice actor, pay the voice actor, probably do a few recordings etc etc. And if months/years down the line you want to change the words, you have to find the same voice actor, arrange for them to come back and spend more time doing recordings.
Voice acting is not always the best idea. Especially if you’re not sure what you are doing is going to last.
You are commander. But ships still have normal human crew. That’s why some ships have visible cockpits and other parts similar to normal aircraft’s. Im not a lore guy, but if I remember correctly, view outside of your ship sound (there is no sound in space) is only generated by pod with data from ship sensors etc. just to give you “data” you can understand.
That is not the most appealing sight, but we are actually this all the time, there was a time when you could see yourself in the mirror looking like a human being, but that was just an ilusion and quickly was removed, to not make you search for your humanity and become like those who are not powerful capsuleers, probably to make you still want to kill millions without blinking.
SOE was right all the time, capsuleers are monsters and it looks we will stay that way.
You mean the man that was talking text into the female Aura? I think voice synth can easily read any text and the ‘voice’ actor just has to repeat the text. Would be about the same work and not sure if any work is done like “Yo dudez I"ll quickly change this rext over here hoping it’s the right text!” in a professional context. Probably not even in CCP offices.
Neither can you see your ship but a camera feed of it, maybe you would project yourself to the bridge, not sure why anyone would do it, but it’s not technologically impossible.
“IF”, dear sir, “IF” they implement it . Then it will change the static to a dynamic avatar. It will make the game a little more modern. That’s it, buy yes, most people always hope for it to become a “PVP FPS shooter/Walking in station” but that is not announced.
If the chances are indeed slim, it is still possible. From there, even if its only Aura in tutorial speaking to you from some small window, and npcs using text to speach software, to the possibility of building scenes involving ur own avatar is rather small step. I wonder if koreans have some demands involving development this time. They could start makng demands at any point seeing those rookie numbers EVE had thru this year. They obviously helped with korean localization. A thing for a thing…
Ha, these avatars with their mumbling. Did anyone see Alton Haveri (spelling?) talk? There was one video where we could see him talking into the camera, at the end, CCP basically showing off their new tech.
All these characters are basically mumbling. It’s pissing me off so much, seriously, you have no idea. They don’t get their ■■■■■■■ mouths open.
It’s supposed to help making the game feel more alive. That’s pretty much the sole purpose of such avatars, in literally any game. Now there is no such thing apart (apart?) of small windows showing agents, which are just photographs anyway.
It’s kind of a modernisation and they’re not wrong with that. This is actually just like modernising graphics to make the game feel more real and or deeper. That’s why we have awesome looking stars! We have those now, because that’s important. Why is that important? Because a star is a big shiny ball full of ■■■■■■■ awesome to look at within the proper spectrum!
That’s why we get mist at the gates, stations and asteroid belts. THAT’s adding visual depth! That’s great for a video game! The nebulae don’t allow for a feeling of space an being big, empty void for the most part of the game. If you want this feeling, you have to head to nullsec which gives a different feeling when looking at space.
The new tech is great (except for the mumbling characters) and the avatar addition makes perfect sense in my eyes. It creates the illusion of there being actual living characters in this game, compared to other players who are “just” spaceships.
I’ve never understood why people in games want to listen. It takes AGES to listen, compared to reading and lip movement/facial expressions RARELY fit together with the voice. It’s an insane time waster. Works for Witcher, sure, but for EVE? Hell no!
The speech API has been a part of windows since XP. Voice synthesis was possible already on the c64 and one of my favourite games back then was a textmode western themed poker. No, not Hold’em, but actual poker.
That worked super well, because the characters all sounded grumpy, slightly aggressive and like they’re chain smokers. Back then that’s all you’ve got out of this tech.
Nowadays the tech behind these APIs is better, but in the end is there no way to get these APIs to actually sound like a human speaking, because all they do is creating the sound of the voices. A human, speaking, is more than just the sound of his voice coming out of his mouth.
The voice starts with the vocal chords. Your skull and whole body work as a resonance body changing it accordingly. Airwaves on their way out have to move through the back of your mouth, your mouth and around your tongue until they reach your lips for that final twist.
Even for those who don’t consciously recognize that it still sounds wrong, because it’s wrong. It’s not how a human sounds like. When a speech API reads text, then you hear written text in speech form, but you don’t actually hear a virtual human reading it. The simulation isn’t good enough.
Instead of modernizing other things involving our avatars specifically. They would start with baby steps now I would say. They were past that years ago and resigned. Things come around cyclically, just a bit changed… Only CCP never changes with their culture of unfinished business.
Your “that” is so specific, I must ask: What voice on reddit?
Hmhmhm.
Movement of mouth/lips can be syncronised with the written text, though they now have the tech to also do it in real time with an actual mouth. But still, using a Speech API saves on cutting down byte size of the whole feature.
EVE only has official support for Windows and Mac, right?
The lemon will be pressed out of juice for maybe 1 year(end of 2021) and from this day on the support will be minimal and the staff of ccp will work for pearl abyss mainly…
I bet it’s like this for about 50% of the staff even now…there is no other explanation for the loss of quality of every “content” and the myriad of small bugs and other things nobody at ccp seems to care about…
Why should they care…they don’t work on the game…
All that CCP announces are just treats that should keep the poeple on the server as long as possible(until the last one realizes what is REALLY going on with CCP and the game)…
From the moment the player count reaches a number that Pearl Abyss has choosen the game goes into minimum maintenance mode and will die slowly…
PLEX your avatar can have supreme jiggly jiggle physics too 
