I am opening this thread to try to understand if driver animation is important for AMS2 users? first let me explain why it is important to me. Before driving in VR, starting about 3 years ago, driver animation was not even a blip on my radar. I was not even using the in game wheel. I was using a very low FOV sitting fairly close to a decent size screen. All I could see was part of the dash and mostly the windshield, seeing part of a wheel and hands moving at the bottom of my screen was detrimental to my immersion. I already was seeing my own real wheel in my hands and was aligning them with the in game dash. Now, I am 100% VR, I am sitting inside a car, I can see everything as if I am there. A properly design cockpit is paradigm, a game driver doing the right movement matching my own movement, like when shifting is very important for immersion. Some SIM are really dated in relation to what you see when driving in VR, like RF2, no animation beside hands on the wheels and the arms and hands look awful. On the other end of the spectrum, ACC, has very elaborate hand gesture and beautiful hand animation, close second is SMS engine, as demonstrated in PCars2. If you are sitting in a dog leg shifting car in PCars2, you can see the game driver shifting dog leg pattern, the feet are moving and the body is positioned perfectly, in all the cars. As stated above, for a long time in my sim experience, I could not care less for all of that since I could not see any of it. Since AMS1 did not support VR, it might be that a large majority of AMS1 people now driving in AMS2, do not care much for driver positioning and animations. I am interested in reading from this crowd what is their opinion on the matter and why it is important to them or not. Depending on how we drive, vr or not, is most likely the main factor of a different perspective on the matter.
Yes please fix them and gauges that currently don’t work across cars. on a good note, the new vintage vehicles are much better for driver animations. They actually animate pedal and shifter movement correctly. So I would imagine it’s just going back through cars and fixing it.
Animations are huge in VR, as is body position. Legs through the seat bottom is really uncomfortable to look at.
No VR here, so I don't need it. Possibility to turn off the steering wheel on all cars is more important!
It would be great to get a bit more movement in the driver's head in replays, especially open wheelers. At the moment the driver's head is quite static given the movement of the car, so if it could wobble a bit more and look into the apex as the car steers that would up the realism in replays. F1 20XX and GT Sport do this very well as an example, their drivers looks alive in the cockpit. This was a thing in PC2, so it might be a limitation of the engine.
Yes.The new Lotus animations are good. But the new Brabham has a very dodgy gear shift animation which kills immersion. Rather have none that a broken one.
You are bringing a good point, I do not agree, I prefer an approximate animation to none at all, but when the animation is totally off, then, none, for now, might be better. In light of the “perfect” animation in the lotus, it is encouraging for the futur of the other in game car animation. I did not realize, there is no possibility to remove the wheel and driver, but that one might be tougher to crack at it could be one of the few thing the SMS engine cannot do.
The state in which it is now sufficient for me, the problems with the animations I read in this forum have very little to do with driving the cars fast and safe, and can be solved by keeping your eyes on track. Improvements to the driver animations have been a very low priority for me.
Driver animations are really important, especially in VR. It really breaks immersion when the driver arms do not work properly. And equally important : the legs and feet should at least look somewhat natural. Unfortunately the legs look really weird in many cars and I nearly lost hope, reiza will fix this in the near future. This issue is present for so long, but nothing changes. They seem to prioritize head position for Formular cars and other minor stuff over those VR issues. Which is really sad, since ams2 could really be one of the best vr experiences. But the legs look like crap. Please Reiza: fix this as soon as possible!
This topic is so near and dear to me. I think it's important not just in VR, but in 2D as well to give more atmosphere (a lot of ppl use fovs that show large chunks of the cockpit), but also seeing other drivers out on track, for replays, and just as part of the showcase of what a sim can be. Among the very pretty, realistic graphics, the ones that show side by side footage of the game on one side and real life footage on the other, once lighting, and physics and textures are sorted, the one thing that ALWAYS gives away which side is the video game is the manikin driving one of the cars - unresponsive, stiff, dead. I've never seen a video game fully try to address this. And it doesn't have to be this way. The games already have everything they need to add realistic driver anims. Simple physics can be added to the three body masses (the head, the torso and hips), or perhaps to the head, arms and legs, so that they bounce around realistically along with the car's suspension. Kart Kraft does an ok job with the legs reacting to g-forces. Further, these games have driving lines, rev counters - the game knows when the car is coming up to a breaking zone, or going on a long straight or when the car needs to shift up or down. When the revs get high, an anim can play so that the arm moves down to the shifter (so that it doesn't snap to it and breaks all immersion). Same when coming up to a breaking zone - the game knows you're gonna have to break, so there should be an anim to match. When shifting up, the game knows how long the straight is, so there's no need to move the arm back to the steering wheel since he's just gonna shift up again. AC somewhat does this but not very successfully. Lastly, the driver turning his head (if implemented at all which most games do not), it shouldn't be based on steering wheel input - it should be based on following the road - again, using the driving line already built into the game. But I don't see this being handled - especially not by a small team like Reiza - they have their hands full as is already. SMS might have been in a position to do something about this - but I don't think that's gonna happen anyway. In general though, I think most devs take the point of view that Olan gave, where he doesn't see it, so he doesn't care. But it should be animated for the same reason suspension is animated in regular cars and not just open wheelers. It's important.
I think detailing it as "immersion-breaking" makes it sound somewhat less than what it is. As if it's just slightly less realistic, like having a steering wheel that's a different shape than the one in the car. What this really is, is a huge perception/vision disconnect that confuses your brain. Immersion breaking doesnt really begin to cover it. You're looking at your body doing unnatural bizarre things. In VR you need the visual feedback just to feel like you're not a disembodied pair of eyeballs and to help you put it together that when the wheel turns, you're turning it. It's almost like trying to draw in the dark or something if you dont have any visual feedback cues to driver inputs. Even if you're driving in the dark with a screen setup, you can still see where the wheel is, where your hands are, even under the glow of screens. Your hand-eye coordination still works. In VR you lose that completely. Just shifting with the wrong side is enough to be very mentally disconcerting. (Such as in the Caterhams) You learn to deal with it, and it's not a massive problem, but I find the driver's torso needs to be in the right spot so I dont feel like my head is severed and 2 feet in front of my shoulders so as to not have my head inside the bodywork of the car. And then having your legs and feet going through solid parts of the car, while you cant feel your legs and feet going through there... all I can say is it's just... disturbing. You sort of learn to tune it out, but there's always a base level of your brain saying "that looks like it should hurt" in the back of your mind. There are many studies showing that the brain can and will perceive pain and other sensations based on purely visual inputs. Body illusions: Rubber hand illusion Fooling the Brain, Fooling the Pain: The Role of Mirror Therapy and Modern Uses in Virtual Reality 'Rubber hand illusion' reveals how the brain understands the body Mirror therapy - Wikipedia
I’d add that the player's head position is wrong in many vehicles in replays - it looks as if the player has their head tilted right back. It’s particularly noticeable in open wheelers such as the Roco
Driver animation and shifting animation is really important and an immersion breaker. Anyone who has driver arms and wheels on... is it in VR or on screen would benefit from this being more invested in, in the near future. The shifting delay and or weird animation what we have right now with sequential or h pattern shifting is really awful and looks weird. (it even looks to me as a place holder in the current state) Is it possible for Reiza to look into this? Its not needed to reinvent the wheel... for example AC mastered it before anyone else. They did a really nice smart feature in the shifting animation with stick gearshifts. That near high rpm on upshifts the animation anticipated that a next gearshift will happen and already moves the hand there and once I hit the next gear the animation is spot on. This way in VR it is amazing, it even is a helper to move your real hand to the shifter at some point. Or is even in sync. I dont know if this kind of detail work can be achieved at some point or perfected (for example open wheel cars like CART would have faster and quicker hands than some oldtimers )
btw... we have way too many sticky threads in the general forum... you have to scroll down to see some new other threads.... crazy
When this thread was started there were far more pressing issues for Reiza to address. Hopefully now that many of the greatest oddities have been patched some of these animations can be looked into as we progress. None distract me enough to affect my enjoyment personally but some of them (the gear shift/hand splat of the Ginetta G40 for example) definitely make me lose time as I break into fits of giggles as I drive round. Hopefully sometime soon.
While we are at it, I'll just chip in with a suggestion/request for driver head movement in replays, Gran Turismo has had it since at least GT5 - you can see the head look to the apex when turning in, makes a massive difference in replays, especially in open wheelers. We already have look to apex in the driving view, so the calculation is being done, but the driver's head it very static in replays as if it's part of the vehicle bodywork. Definitely from the 'nice to haves' list, but it would be nice to have it one day for sure.
Only a little thing but it would be good if they could fix the animation for where the Hans clips onto the helmet, it is not currently attached and as the head moves you can see the clip moving around in front of where it attaches
In VR, all of it is important, and most of isn't important when not in VR. You don't see the driver's legs on a flat screen, so I can understand non-VR players not giving that any thought at all. I'd put mirrors as top of the list for now, especially when in VR. For literally every car, the centre view(ie: directly behind you) is set too far to the inside, meaning you have to lean basically out of your seat to see directly behind you. In PC2, I loved the mirror adjustment feature, where(like the seat position) you could set it for each car type. I don't use virtual mirrors in VR, so I love taking a quick glance, to see the immediate proximity of cars behind. This isn't really possible in AMS2, unless the cars are right on your gearbox.
It doesn't affect me while I'm driving as long as the wheel is at a proper distance from my hands/arms. The best solution is for game developers to support hands tracking in the game.
