Performing Avatar Gaze & Real Facial Animation in EQ2

A pandaren has been spotted. WoW Players rushing to the scene. MoP frenzy!

The timing, it’s perfect!

I actually wanted to write an article about performing gaze in WoW and whoopsie, I read on Spinksville that EverQuest 2 is allowing you to map real facial animation and voice fonts on to your avatar.

• Youtube: EverQuest II: Facial Recognition and Voice Modulation – SOE-mote

The reception amongst gamers doesn’t surprise me: “What? this is not a game mechanic? I am looking at my avatar from behind anyways!”.

However, MMO’s are incredibly social games, even if we discount the roleplay, which, as far as I can understand, this is meant for. It makes sense to me that a game company would eventually develop something like this, I guess I expected to see it in a virtual world like Second Life first… do they have this already?

Spinks herself posed an interesting question concerning immersion:

“I’m just not sure whether I prefer that CRPGs keep the communication fairly limited, its one of the things that makes them so good as escapist experiences. There was an originally a notion that your character in a virtual world was a character with a background and culture of its own (even if it wasn’t all that well detailed). The closer characters get to the players, the more that difference fades.”

I can see why voice could cross that boundary, but in terms of making your avatar smile when you smiled, I can only imagine how that would intensify your immersion, given that you can turn the feature off when you wanted to. I don’t look at my characters from the front that often either, but I could imagine conversation with other characters could be enriched by seeing them smile. When I saw the  video linked above, my thoughts were that your facial expressions are not for you, they are for whoever is looking at you.

Don’t we already perform gaze in WoW?

I believe we do.

Since a lot of characters don’t even have pupils, and since we have such limited control of our characters head and face movements, the best way to see where someone else is looking, is what they are targeting.

Sometimes a character will run past me and suddenly stop right before me. Sometimes they turn around facing me, sometimes they just stand with their backs to me. Usually they are inspecting me, of course I can see this if I target them and they have me targeted. I can also be sneaky and just /assist them, and jump straight to whoever they are targeting, without them knowing that I now know that they are targeting me, heh heh.

That’s the thing, someone could be looking at you, without even facing you. This stuff is confusing in WoW!

Identity crisis in Blue Mars

“Look, there’s that stalker I was telling you about”

I visited a (now closed down) virtual world a while ago called Blue Mars. Gaze was also something the developers there had experimented with, but in my opinion with creepy result.

Avatars, including my own, would acknowledge my presence by looking at me, a presence I didn’t believe I had, as I thought I was the lady in green on the picture to the right.

As you can see, she was uncomfortable with me walking behind her all the time, whispering behind my back with the other avatars. Seriously, in Blue Mars Avatars were like the machines in the Matrix, ready to take over the world!

“They didn’t even look at me”

With few exceptions, they did.

I’m talking about the WoW Factor Shows and the initial reason I wanted to return to the avatar gaze. Every event someone will not win a prize, limited amounts of gold and time on our hands means this is unavoidable. Even though we make sure to run back and forth between people and tell them that we’re 3-4 of us looking, someone still says “they didn’t even look at me” and 96% of the time, we did, but we’re obviously not conveying this well enough.

Last time we all sat down and spoke, I brought it up: “How do we convey to people that we are not ignoring them”. I suggested targeting them, even though you can tell what people are wearing by just looking at them, there’s an expectation, that they have not been properly looked at unless we also inspect them. Targeting people at the events could reassure them that someone did look at them, basically we need to perform gaze better!

WoW Factor Event from Earthen Ring-US, one of my favourite shows. There was not a single troll there, can you believe it? Not a single troll.

Then Elvine said something I had not thought of: “They think we’re not looking at them because they only see what I see”. Elvine runs the livestream, so his gaze is not cloaked like ours, his screen is his gaze, everyone can see exactly what, and especially who, Elvine is looking at.

Dammit! I thought I had the solution, but maybe avoiding people feeling ignored is not as easy as I thought.

But I would absolutely love to have facial animation in WoW! I would love to be able to perform gaze more accurately.

…Although, then everyone would know I walk around the events looking like this:

Making a 3D Game Character Myself

This is what I’ve been doing in the past month of inactivity here on the blog:

If this guy seems familiar to you, it’s because I tried to recreate Carl Fredricksen from “Up”.

I know this is not stunning work, it’s my first time working with 3ds Max, so I am an amateur. I decided to take a course this semester called “3D Game Art”, it’s a beginner’s course so I figured I should be able to pass it even while being a total noob.

At first I hated it so much. Some classes I would sit with crashing programs and a computer that didn’t want to cooperate. If that wasn’t the problem, then I was – clueless and trying to figure out the modeling program 3ds Max.

To pass the course, we had to make a low poly 3D character. Low poly means in layman’s terms “simple”, all the characters we control in WoW are fx. low poly. We had to texture it and rig it. Rigging it means giving the character a skeleton which enables you to pose and even animate it. We didn’t have to use animation and I haven’t even looked into it yet, so I wouldn’t know how complicated it would be, but I am tempted to give it a go, just for fun.

I hated working on my character at first, but the further in my progress I was, the more I started to enjoy it. I’ve been used to doing writing heavy assignments in the past and now I was doing a production course, it was actually liberating!

At the end, I felt as if I had unlocked a secret code. I had made my own 3D character, and now I knew a little more about what’s behind our mobile virtual world repositories.

I can’t code, but I’ve been forced to learn some as part of my education. In one way it’s fascinating and as if you get a glimpse behind the curtain of the graphics and UI’s. At the same time, it was as if the magic of computer games was also endangered by me learning more and more about the inner workings of them.

The world suddenly seemed more artificial. In the past I used to be fascinated with the edges of Azeroth. They appeared to me as critical borderlines that could reveal something about the true nature of the virtual world, like trying to figure out what a house looks like by only investigating it from the inside. But now falling through into the nether is no longer a mysterious event, that used to leave me puzzled and curious, it’s just a glitch.

Making a 3D game character from the bottom reveals these “secrets” the same way. It becomes a reversed deconstruction. Carl is human enough that he has a skeleton, that he could be told to walk, but when removing his “skin”, his robotic truth is revealed.

Carl is the intellectual property of Pixar, so I don’t think I am allowed to port him into Second Life and buy him an animation and bring him to life, which would have been an awesome finale. Regardless of how imprisoned in 3ds Max my dear Carl is, I can now be the creator of my own shape and form in a virtual world if I’m willing to go through the process again.

That is after all a strange feeling of power.

Second Life meets WoW – about Virtual Worlds

Field trip to WoW is a blogpost by Vaneeesa Blaylock (In WoW “Veebee”), a Second Life performance artist, who invited her friends along for a trip around various virtual worlds, WoW being the second in line.

I thought it could be fun to make myself available as a tourguide, since it could give me a new perspective on something I’ve grown accustomed to: How I percieve and understand WoW. Also being able to chat to people about our different virtual worlds and avatars was a great bonus.

The “Second Lifers” entered World of Warcraft through the means of a trial account, which is free although restricted. Vaneeesa’s guide to setting up a trial account is actually very helpful and I recommend it, if you should be interested in taking a hike here as well (and should you be needing a guide, you know who to contact!).

I chose my draenei shaman as my character, and brought along Zenevieva the kitty druid to accompany me. We started off in the starting zone for night elves, Teldrassil.

The group grew quickly but was surprisingly silent. Trial accounts using /say is not visible to ordinary players (due to goldsellers advertizing), and we spent most of the trip having forgotten this, and thus lost out on a more synergic experience for the first part of the tour.

Planning the route became pretty simple, when it dawned on me that trial accounts only have access to vanilla WoW, meaning they only get to see the game as it was created in 2005/6.

I couldn’t take them to the floating city of Dalaran, nor Silvermoon or Exodar which I think are beautiful cities.

Instead, we took a trip to:

1. Dolanaar
2. Darnassus – the capital of the night elves
3. Boat to Darkshore
4. Boat to Stormwind – the capital of humans
5. Deeprun Tram to Ironforge – the capital of the dwarves

6.  And in the end watching the view over Dun Morogh from the ledge at the Ironforge Gates.

…avoiding Goldshire was a given.

A horde tour could possibly have been more scenic, using the zeppelin between capitals.

Virtual time + virtual distance = real space?

When we had to pick up Frossl and later Ransvor, in order to add them to the group, a major difference became evident: Distance and time in WoW and Second Life are not the same.

We had already earlier established how the day cycle differs: In Second Life a day is 4 hours long (3 daylight hours and 1 nighttime), in WoW it follows earth hours, depending on which geographical server you are connected to.

TP’ing means teleporting. Mages can teleport in WoW and Warlocks can summon, but it’s not openly available to go wherever you want in WoW in an instant.

Vaneeesa writes: “You really were in a place, and other places and distances had real meaning. TP-ing in SL is very convenient and very powerful and IDK if I’d give it up, but it really does diminish the experience.“ (Field Trip Report: WoW!)

Distance is in direct relation to time, as what really matters about travelling, is how long it takes. It’s a choice to make, when creating a virtual world. The time it takes, to travel somewhere inside this world will, besides it’s actual surface area, act as a projection of percieved size. Second Life, as I understood it, is much bigger than WoW, but travelling is not an issue (besides teleporting you can fly without a mount!) In WoW you are bound to slower means of transportation, often land- and flying mounts, not to mention gravity.

It’s interesting – why would game developers choose for us to travel slowly, basically wasting our time, when the fastest means of transportation is a choice of design?

I would imagine travel defined by avatar percieved geographical relations, time is one of the tools you can use for your virtual world to resemble realistic space.

Are you an Avatar or a Character?

It became clear to us, that our new friends from Second Life were impressed by the WoW world as it was created  by Blizzard, but unimpressed by the fact they couldn’t add to it, there is no user-content. (In fact, all of WoW is owned by Blizzard, even your lvl 80 character is virtual property of WoW, you are just renting it and the access to the rest of the package deal. It feels absurd to me, that my hard-earned gear, gold and my characters, that i’m personally attached to, isn’t mine, never was and never will be).

Also the character design options were much fewer, than what they were used to, as in Second Life you can be anything.

Despite the samples I found above, I get the impression most people feel more comfortable in a human like avatar.

I noticed straight away our various ways of defining our visual representation in whatever world we were in.

In second life, they use “avatar” or “resident“. I’m not sure of the difference, other than resident being tied to Second Life termonology, and avatar being a broader term, meaning a direct representation of a person.

In WoW we primarily use “character“, I also have friends who prefer “toon“.

“Character” ties to the idea that only part of someones identity is represented, and toon addresses the fantasy style that is WoW design.

Character also means: “a person represented in a drama, story, etc.” WoW being based on a substantial catalogue of lore books, perhaps explains the choice of the word. This storyline is also the framework within which characters are defined and interpreted.

How many alts does it take to make a main?

Near the end of the tour, we automatically ended up discussing the idea of having alts as a reflection of the different aspects to an identity, as Vaneeesa writes:

“While a lot of SL peeps do create alts for various reasons, I think a lot of SL peeps also powerfully identify with a “main avatar.” That may also be true in WoW, but it seems like multiple avatars there is much more encouraged.” (Field Trip Report: WoW!)

Having a main is widely the norm in WoW too, both for roleplayers, PvP’ers and raiders, because more time invested means more goals achieved.

However in the forthcoming expansion, Cataclysm, I believe players will distribute their time more equally between mains and alts, perhaps even having two mains (if that doesn’t defy the definition), due to the shared lock out of both 10 and 25 man raids.

In Second Life you can only have one avatar per account, but that one avatar can change appearence to whatever whenever. That is in no way the case in WoW, as a character’s appearance is bound to many factors: race, class, gender, level, face, skin color and name (Hair style and color can be changed at the goblin stylist shop, the rest can be achieved through buying a character makeover/race-, faction or name change through Blizzard. These are however considered big decisions by WoW players).

Due to the restrictions in the WoW character creation, factors such as class and race encourage you to try out a different playstyle to change and perhaps expand your game experience.

Realms and Community – In WoW it’s all about which server you’re on.

Ironically, WoW players are not connected completely, we are bound to a server/realm and therefore live in identical parallel universes. On Argent Dawn EU during peak hours, there’s approx. 3200 players online at the same time (Data based on Aug 2010).

The RealID friendslist has although changed the complete segregation, and if you have befriended someone, you can chat cross server, but still not meet in character through fx simple teleporting!

The feeling of belonging to a community, I’m guessing, is stronger in Second Life. In WoW a realm acts almost as a nationality, and that is practically true with a realm such as Crushridge, which is largely Italian.

Lag – at least RL doesn’t have it!

The day the tour took off was a nice lag free evening. Most days are lag free in WoW, and if they are not, the forums and chat channels fill with complaints. Combat becomes unplayable with only a little lag, so players have a very low tolerance. “Going from Second Life to WoW was like an iron lung victim making a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Two words: Frame Rate.“, Vaneeesa writes.

Second Life uses an average of 80 kbps downstream. WoW uses 30-40 kbps, which is comparable to Second  Life while remaining stationary. The difference lies within the game system, the way in which data is being handled.

Underneath is a picture of the floating city of Dalaran – the place that does lag quite often, due to it’s current status as the most interconnected capital in WoW, and thus most populated.

I have all of WoW on my computer, it takes up almost 18 GB (as of patch 3.3.5). All skins, meshes, objects – everything is not downloaded, but instead preinstalled. The only thing that needs downloading and server response, is relative postitioning and interactions between me, other players and npc’s. This helps keep the framerate down and steady.

Second Life exists on different external servers, rather than the individual computer, and thus needs to be downloaded when travelling to different regions, which makes the downstream spike, reducing framerate. So downloads can go up a lot when exploring in Second Life. Lag is the price to pay for user-generated content.

In the end I can say that I’ve grown more curious about other virtual worlds, including Second Life, which luckily for me, is free to use.

Pictures courtesy of: Field trip to WoW, Field Trip Report: WoW!, http://vaneeesa.blogspot.com/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaneeesab/sets/72157624629145651/, Higher Education as Virtual Conversation