I am pretty sure there were some dev comments way back addressing how this would be problematic to implement without either having performance issues or capes that looked like crap...

Capes/cloaks would be an awesome addition to the game.

Would certainly make it easier to get them set bonuses by adding another slot.

ArchMikem wrote: »

ZOS said no, Engine cant support it. Lag would be worse.

Not true. If that were the case then we would not have banners, flags and light armor robes. If capes behaved inline with robes thats one thing but a floppy cape would be another and would possibly cause problems. It boils down to cloth physics.
SWTOR uses hero engine and capes are in the game.

one of those threads that must be started again every 3 months...

and every 3 months we must repeat same answers


i feel really sorry for that poor dead horse's body =/

Not me that’s for sure.

Don’t want one, don’t need one and definitely don’t want to see any.

kargen27 wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Cape will add another armor slot! I'm for it, it will open road for all kind of weird set combinations...

Why would you think that? A guild talbard doesn't and if they could do a cape I'm thinking that is the way it would be done.

ZoS has said capes won't work and looking at some of the long hair styles I am inclined to believe them. We may want capes but if we got them I doubt anybody would be happy with the way they look. We are still complaining about hip flaps and capes would be much worse than those abominations.

What do you mean with long hair styles? Cmon zos. we just need those hair from dlc x_x

It's not an issue of performance, it's an issue of effort and whether Zenimax is smart enough to not do them in a dumb way. Capes don't even really need proper cloth physics -- of course proper cloth physics would look excellent, but they're not necessary.

Super simple capes, or really any form of loose cloth, can be animated by combining ragdoll physics (physics-driven animation) and IK rigging (anti-clipping). Use an IK approach to animating the cape, which would prevent clipping, and use physics to drive the IK animation.

This is very similar to how modern animation systems that use IK rigging for character animations work, rather than animators manually animating each individual bone and joint, they simply apply a general force, and the IK rig takes care of how the bones and joints react. Same thing can be applied to capes.

ESO already has a basic IK system in place for animating feet, it can be extended to animating other parts of our characters.

WeerW3ir wrote: »

Capes was a thing before. But as you can see no elder scroll game has any Capes. Anyway at one point they considered it, but the engine is not supporting cape mechanics. As it cannot support flying mounts, and water physics.( No waves at all) Just simply cant handle it.

1. Skyrim has numerous cape/cloak mods that piggyback off of the ragdoll physics available with Havok, and I'm pretty sure Oblivion also has a few.

2. Flying mounts and water physics have nothing to do with capes. They're irrelevant to this discussion.

3. Waves are doubly irrelevant, because you don't even need a proper physics engine to compute them. Look at the 2D fluid simulations in Unreal Engine 4, that are done completely through shaders and blueprints (for drawing to a render target).

GoldenLight wrote: »

It would be nice to see in the game but something I don't see them ever doing. May be possible if they made it an animation that was client side only and was not part of the server. Just having that option for pre-loaded cloaks that are in the client side.

The down side it that they would not be seen in the world and it would look strange with you playing the game and only seeing a cloak/cape on your character but no one else.

That's not how it works. Functionally, client-sided capes would work the exact same as costumes, outfits and styles. The server just keeps track of basic information to identify and define the costume/outfit/style you're wearing -- ie its ID, colour, etc -- and the client takes that information and actually uses it to display the costume/outfit/style on your screen.

Capes would work the exact same way, with the server just keeping track of what cape style you've got equipped, what colour it is, etc, and the client is responsible for drawing and animating it.

Katahdin wrote: »

The servers would probably have a melt down trying to render them all

Servers aren't responsible for rendering. Your client is. Servers also aren't responsible for minor aesthetic physics calculations, either, such as particle effects or how hair should move. Your client is. Capes are no different.

Katahdin wrote: »

jcm2606 wrote: »

It's not an issue of performance, it's an issue of effort and whether Zenimax is smart enough to not do them in a dumb way. Capes don't even really need proper cloth physics -- of course proper cloth physics would look excellent, but they're not necessary.

Super simple capes, or really any form of loose cloth, can be animated by combining ragdoll physics (physics-driven animation) and IK rigging (anti-clipping). Use an IK approach to animating the cape, which would prevent clipping, and use physics to drive the IK animation.

This is very similar to how modern animation systems that use IK rigging for character animations work, rather than animators manually animating each individual bone and joint, they simply apply a general force, and the IK rig takes care of how the bones and joints react. Same thing can be applied to capes.

ESO already has a basic IK system in place for animating feet, it can be extended to animating other parts of our characters.

WeerW3ir wrote: »

Capes was a thing before. But as you can see no elder scroll game has any Capes. Anyway at one point they considered it, but the engine is not supporting cape mechanics. As it cannot support flying mounts, and water physics.( No waves at all) Just simply cant handle it.

1. Skyrim has numerous cape/cloak mods that piggyback off of the ragdoll physics available with Havok, and I'm pretty sure Oblivion also has a few.

2. Flying mounts and water physics have nothing to do with capes. They're irrelevant to this discussion.

3. Waves are doubly irrelevant, because you don't even need a proper physics engine to compute them. Look at the 2D fluid simulations in Unreal Engine 4, that are done completely through shaders and blueprints (for drawing to a render target).

GoldenLight wrote: »

It would be nice to see in the game but something I don't see them ever doing. May be possible if they made it an animation that was client side only and was not part of the server. Just having that option for pre-loaded cloaks that are in the client side.

The down side it that they would not be seen in the world and it would look strange with you playing the game and only seeing a cloak/cape on your character but no one else.

That's not how it works. Functionally, client-sided capes would work the exact same as costumes, outfits and styles. The server just keeps track of basic information to identify and define the costume/outfit/style you're wearing -- ie its ID, colour, etc -- and the client takes that information and actually uses it to display the costume/outfit/style on your screen.

Capes would work the exact same way, with the server just keeping track of what cape style you've got equipped, what colour it is, etc, and the client is responsible for drawing and animating it.

Katahdin wrote: »

The servers would probably have a melt down trying to render them all

Servers aren't responsible for rendering. Your client is. Servers also aren't responsible for minor aesthetic physics calculations, either, such as particle effects or how hair should move. Your client is. Capes are no different.

It doesnt matter how it is rendered.

ZoS has been asked this numerous times. Their response was capes, done right would cause too much of a performance hit to be viable in the game. Their comments are recorded in an ESO Live if you want to hunt it down.
You can argue with the people that built the game about it but until things change capes will not be a thing in ESO.

The best we could expect would be pretty much stiff as a board capes stapled to the character's rear end like the Breton costume, not the flowing capes that require cloth physics that people want.

And that's because they don't know how to properly design them.

Other MMO's and large scale online games include capes, cloaks, cloth physics, and physics for dangling anything, without murdering performance. Most immediate one that comes to mind that's a good comparison is GW2, which has had a scaled down version of physics-based animation (using physics to animate outfits and objects), and just recently added capes.

Warframe and Destiny 2 also feature full scale cloth physics, as I'm sure do many other games.

There's nothing special about capes, cloaks, or any sort of cloth physics, that makes them impossible for an MMO. It all comes down to whether they've been implemented properly, and I can guarantee they weren't, when Zenimax tried to implement them.

EDIT: And just so we're clear, there's a difference between the game being too slow for capes to be implemented, and the capes themselves being too slow to be implemented. I'm not saying the game isn't too slow, it is. I'm not saying FPS will drop, it will. I'm saying that capes, when done properly, not right (knowing Zenimax, they probably went full cloth sim, where even something super simple like a client-sided ragdoll physics calculated against a spine for the cape would do), are not as slow as you think they are.