The only way capes would ever work and not look completely hideous would be if they had cloth physics, and that's never going to happen.

See, the funny thing is, the game already has one precursor to proper cape animation, and even to clipping; an IK animation system. The game has it set up for the feet, it could also be added for capes to keep them from clipping with our legs, and it could also be added for weapons/shields to keep them from clipping with our head/arms, and possible capes.

It's less an issue of can't do it, more an issue of won't do it, because basic cape physics really isn't that hard. A naive model for cape physics would literally just add some extra bones to our back to animate the cape, and have ragdoll physics run against those bones. This is how all the Havok cape mods and such work for Skyrim (and the other, more jiggly physics mods), and I'm pretty sure ESO uses Havok for its physics/animation systems, so...

Let's not.

Seriously though, if you want capes, you can have them, as far as I am concerned.

Banana wrote: »

Servers and lag first

Dream on.

There will, however, probably be a cape in the Crown store next month for a very reasonable 2000 Crowns.

Minyassa wrote: »

It's not that the game engine can't handle capes. We already have the animation precedent in-game for capes--just watch a camel mount, with the draped caparison and its tassels swaying in the breeze as it runs. That's exactly what would be done with capes, so it's already been built.

What they refuse to do is spend all the time it would take to adjust each cape model for each motif piece it was paired with, because there's just no way. It would be ongoing development for every piece every time a new motif was added. That's just an infinite amount of work asking to happen. They'd have to do that or the pokethrough would have people screaming incessantly, and the only solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaay more man-hours than they are willing to pay for.

As I said earlier, the solution to that is an IK animation system, which they already have for animating our feet. So long as any pieces in question have a collision mesh (which can be generated from a rendering mesh pretty easily, basically all public game engines literally just have a button you press to generate a rough collision mesh for the object), they can hook up an IK animation system for capes that allows them to automatically and coherently interact with other parts of the character.

Briefly, an IK animation system is basically the reverse of a traditional animation system. If we were to animate a hand moving down and pressing against a table under a traditional animation system, we basically rotate the bones within the skeleton around the joints in a very specific way such that the hand rests on the table. Under an IK animation system, all the joints are automated within a very specific set of bounds, such that we literally just have to move the hand onto the table, and the skeleton aligns itself within the bounds, automatically rotating every bone to what they should naturally be.

Done properly, an IK animation system can be quite fast (the slowest part is literally finding obstacles, the actual animation of the skeleton itself is very fast), significantly reduces the amount of work animators have to do (they just need to tell the skeleton where it should go, not how it should get there), allows for very easily blending between animations (since the rotations of everything are automated, it just takes moving the destination to blend between animations), and even allows for animations that would be enormous under a traditional animation system (having a character's movement adapt to what's around them).

If capes were to use an IK animation system, all that would need to be done is to figure out where any obstacles are between where the cape current sits and where it wants to go (can be done by casting a ray from the current position to the desired position, specifically looking for obstacles), move the cape to where the obstacle is, and the cape's "skeleton" will automatically adjust itself accordingly.

As I said, it's less an issue of can't do it, more an issue of won't do it. They already have an IK animation system in the game, there's literally dozens of papers about full IK animation systems, they just don't want to put the time, resources and effort into something that's very superfluous.