I just noticed some grass blocks are fully green :o
Looks cool
LOVE them all! can’t wait to use them in game!
Hello… New to the forum, and haven’t delved too deep yet (Love what I see tho), so maybe this is redundant but I’m curious if you’ll be able to sit in furniture. Thank you!
Not yet but we’re all hoping and quite positive it will be possible in the future.
I love all of these but I find it disconcerting that his mouth never opens… Creeps me out…
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Would it be possible to put in facial animations as a texture overlay on the face of character models? Nothing huge, but something like the occasional mouth movement, and different eyes, in addition to maybe gender specific facial traits?
It’s possible, but think of it like this:
5 (neutral, happy, sad, angry, confused) different face emote states * 4 face variations for customisation * 2 genders * 4 races = 160 individual face textures
…so that’s quite a lot of art time, and it’s a multiplying cost for every race/face option we want to add. So it’s something we have to be careful about early on so we don’t introduce a bunch of work for a small amount of value.
Welcome to the world of development where we have to make decisions 
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That’s not saying “so don’t do it”, but that there’s costs to consider. There’s some areas that have huge costs, but we think they’re worth it (character customisation, for example).
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The static facial expression makes this confusing to me.
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TLDR in the middle, before the disclaimer.
To emote is to portray emotion in a theatrical manner. These “emotes” are the characters using excessive motions and gestures to display various physical emotional states. Body language does this in real life and it’s something humans are pretty good at picking up. In fact, when body language and facial expression match, we are best at picking up on the emotion being portrayed. But when body language and facial expression are not matched, our judgment is hampered and we have a bias towards using body language to perceive the emotion.
In fact, body language is such a strong indicator of emotion that even partially blind individuals can implicitly perceive bodily emotion. So these emotes seem at least have the potential to show emotion (and I think many of us would say they have achieved that goal).
The argument could be made that any resulting confusion from the lack of facial emotion could be due to race of the character we see (claiming that it’s not “human” enough, even though I don’t think it’s a particularly strong argument). However, humans are capable of seeing emotion in non-humanoids (which is why everyone loves BB-8) so it seems that the physical expression of emotion in a not-quite-human character should be possible
I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that it is possible to see the emotion being displayed in each and every one of these emotes. @gerryjacobs has done excellent work and we should recognize through @ben’s repeated attempts at explanations that facial emotion isn’t something that’s a worthy goal right now compared to other, more integral bits of development. We should accept that facial emotions are on the table as a possibility and spend more time celebrating the progress being made and pointing out what we like and don’t like with the emotes instead of the faces (so as to help guide development as a community). Or at least that’s what I think.
Disclaimer: Although I replied to you, Hiyosup, this post is aimed at everyone who is focusing on the lack of facial expression despite Ben and Gerry explaining multiple times why there are currently no facial expressions. If we, as a community, stay excessively focused on something, even after being told multiple times why it is the way it is and further being told that it might happen in the future, instead of focusing on celebrating and critiquing what we’re actually being shown, then the devs might feel less incentive to share things in the future. And I don’t think any of us want that!
Now, who wants ice cream?
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I think you’re missunderstanding something.
We’re saying “great stuff but the faces” because there is nothing else that bothers us about the emotes and not because we didn’t read or understand what Ben wrote.
The only thing I would change are the slow clap, the fast clap and the face for the intimidate emote.
Because Gerry nailed everything else.
Should I just say everything is awesome because Ben said faces take too much work to do for now?
No, of course not. We should critizise and not cheer everything.
Even if the faces won’t be implemented (yet). They are still what bothers us the most and we should say that.
Of course there is a difference in stating ones opinion and demanding something. But noone demanded anything as far as I’m concerned.
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So much this. Very good lesson to learn and share, thanks Ben.
Are they going to have face animations as well? They look very unnatural
For the record I think the suggestions about facial animations are totally valid and I think they’d add a lot! Your comments are valid and appreicated as always. On many games this wouldn’t even be up for discussion – they’d be in the game. Boundless is a bit different, and our budget / team configuration mean that we sometimes need design things as smartly as possible, or make hard decisions. Facial animations vs character customisation is a legitimate decision we have to make.
I apologise if sometimes I expose too much complexity to our decision making process here – it may not be interesting to you and it might bog down interesting conversation in decisions only we really need to worry about. In many ways this is often just me sharing a good portion of the work Ollie and I do: making tough decisions, trying to spend our focus in the areas that matter most.
Since joining the industry 8-ish years ago the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that design is as much an elaborate juggling act as it is coming up with cool ideas and implementations. The best design is ambitious and original but also elegant in it’s proposed implementation and achievable with your team.
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I’m all for hearing about your decision making process personally, as I’m sure are quite a few others who are interested in how games are made - and I thank you for sharing these insights! It’s often a side, we as players, don’t get to see, so it’s very interesting to me what choices have to be made with regards to achievability within certain timescales and restrictions, whilst still maintaining an even balance and a great game.
Character customisation FTW!
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I think that was just to show that even if there are only 4 races the amount of work is huge.
@ben I always love to hear how you (the devs) decide on what to implement and what not. It helps me understand and I might learn a rhing or two for the future.
So please share as much of your decision process as you think is needed so we understand how and why your decisions came to be.
After all, we’re here to participate in (kind of) making this game and not just to see quick progress updates without reasoning.
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