Crowd animations suck

[AstroManLuca]

Seriously, every game I've played that has crowd animations (pretty much racing and sports games) does a really poor job of them. A common theme seems to be animations that are perfectly synced so half the crowd is doing the exact same thing at once.

Honestly, it strikes me as extremely lazy. If you're only going to have three different animations, at least stagger them so it doesn't look like everyone's part of a choreographed dance routine!

 

[zerocool84]

Well there's only so much they can do with the limited memory on the console's.

 

[Sulaco]

EA games, especially football, are HORRIBLE about this. It's really sad. The crowd in the NCAA Football games still looks PSX quality, at least early, early PS2.

I'm quite impressed with NBA 2K11 though. The crowd animations are far superior. I do wish there was a bit more consistency and realism with people wearing team colored shirts and jerseys, but all in all, it's quite good.

 

[Sadaiyappan]

2K and Rock* clearly do a better job with crowd then EA does. And Sony's baseball game has good crowd too. The devs are either lazy and have poorly run projects, or they just can't afford to improve the crowd and spend $$ on other things. Programming wise it is ridiculous that half the crowd looks the same and is doing the same thing at the same time.

 

[velillen]

i could care less what the crowd look slike when im going 150mph around the race track TBH. Higher quality road/grass/sand that im paying attention to is where id rather the time be spent personally.

But yes the crowds in like fifa 11 are meh. but dont see them or focus on them either to much

 

[FalseChristian]

You're never gonna get a good-looking crowd as on a PC because of the PC's superior graphics ability.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Why would devs spend the time to animate and design individual crowd people? I rather they focused on other things in the game.

 

[Sadaiyappan]

Not each individual - that kind of thing is probably 20 years off. But atleast make it more randomn. 20 faces, 20 body types, a couple of diff outfits, random colors on the outfits. Then randomize all of the parts. Then random animation for AI (within the team they are cheering for) for each member of the crowd instead of having a big section of the crowd doing the same thing.

That they might be able to on PS4/Xbox 3. People at Sony make claims that no game is using the full power of the PS3 which means they could make crowd like that if they have the programming skill but everyone knows PS3 is a bitch to program for and maybe it is too expensive to create a crowd like that within the limited memory.

 

[Raduque]

You're never gonna get a good-looking crowd as on a PC because of the PC's superior graphics ability.

PC games have shitty crowds too.

 

[Sadaiyappan]

It actually doesn't make sense to me about the crowd outfits. The animation makes sense if there is not enough memory. But each person in the crowd could easily have more random color outfits because the crowd outfits are determined before the game begins. So it seems like it wouldn't take up any more memory if each person in the crowd is given a value for the color of their outfit. Unless they are cheating and saying that an entire section of a crowd is a single object and giving that object one value for cloth color. But even then, they could place the members of that object (that group of the crowd) randomly in the stadium to make it appear that each individual crowd member is an object.

 

[blurredvision]

As said before, the NBA2K series has the best crowds out of any game IMO. Multiple animations, people walking up and down the stairs while playing, watching people squeeze towards the aisle....all pretty awesome stuff.

 

[AstroManLuca]

You're never gonna get a good-looking crowd as on a PC because of the PC's superior graphics ability.

LOL, okay. I actually created this thread after playing Dirt 2 on my PC and seeing half the crowd making the exact same fist-pumping gesture at the exact same time.

Not to mention your argument makes no sense because most PC games are console ports anyway. I guess you could say that a PC-only game could potentially have better crowd animations than a cross platform game, but how many games are there that are PC-only and have excellent crowds? Can you name even one example?

As said before, the NBA2K series has the best crowds out of any game IMO. Multiple animations, people walking up and down the stairs while playing, watching people squeeze towards the aisle....all pretty awesome stuff.

Cool. Only 2K sports game I've played is NFL 2k5. And, well... obviously that was an old game, made for the Xbox and PS2, so the crowds were really simple most of the time. But they did still put a nice effort into giving the game a sports broadcast feel. They'd cut to the crowd and show people doing various things you'd expect at a game. If only 2K could keep making NFL games...

It actually doesn't make sense to me about the crowd outfits. The animation makes sense if there is not enough memory. But each person in the crowd could easily have more random color outfits because the crowd outfits are determined before the game begins. So it seems like it wouldn't take up any more memory if each person in the crowd is given a value for the color of their outfit. Unless they are cheating and saying that an entire section of a crowd is a single object and giving that object one value for cloth color. But even then, they could place the members of that object (that group of the crowd) randomly in the stadium to make it appear that each individual crowd member is an object.

Yeah, agreed. It's one thing to say that there's limited memory for creating many different character models, textures, and animations. But at the very least they should be able to do a random palette swap on individual members of the crowd and stagger their animations (or even change the speed at which they animate) so it looks at least a little more random.

I mean come on, Diablo II has palette swaps. Mario has palette swaps. Tons of games have variable animation speeds.

 

[BD2003]

Yeah, agreed. It's one thing to say that there's limited memory for creating many different character models, textures, and animations. But at the very least they should be able to do a random palette swap on individual members of the crowd and stagger their animations (or even change the speed at which they animate) so it looks at least a little more random.

I mean come on, Diablo II has palette swaps. Mario has palette swaps. Tons of games have variable animation speeds.

Those games you mentioned are all 2D for a reason. Its more difficult to do what you want to do on a 3D console. It does require a lot more memory or computational resources just to swap palettes. Even staggering animations requires significantly more CPU resources - you had the option to turn that on/off in the total war PC games (with thousands of characters on screen) for a reason.

Theyre pushing these ancient consoles to the edge already. Anything resources put towards the crowd gets taken away from the game. Important in an NBA game, so they take the time and dedicate the resources. Far less important in a racing game.

Next console generation will certainly do way better at this.

 

[RavenSEAL]

MLB the show has the great, if not the best crowd animation in video games.

 

[RavenSEAL]

PC games have shitty crowds too.

That's because studios are too lazy, so they just port from consoles.

 

[KentState]

Why would devs spend the time to animate and design individual crowd people? I rather they focused on other things in the game.

Any studio would just need to create one library for crowd animation and could be used across all products. Even GT5 looks silly at times when you have beautiful scenery, but with PS1 quality by-standards next to the track.

 

[Sadaiyappan]

Any studio would just need to create one library for crowd animation and could be used across all products. Even GT5 looks silly at times when you have beautiful scenery, but with PS1 quality by-standards next to the track.

2K and Rock* have to be sharing code. I swear that the way the crowd cheers in NBA 2k games is the exact same way the crowd cheers in Red Dead Redemption when you do the horse carriage races.

 

[Ross Ridge]

I mean come on, Diablo II has palette swaps. Mario has palette swaps. Tons of games have variable animation speeds.

No modern 3D hardware has support for palettes. If you want to have one person in a blue shirt and another in red shirt then allocating texture space for both is your only option with reasonable performance.

If you have 10 people in sync doing same animations then they all can share the work it takes to animate them. If instead you have 10 people each with it's own animation then hardware needs to do 10 times the work.

Personally, I find it amazing that games use anything more than crude 2D billboards for crowds. Every CPU cycle, every GPU cycle, every byte of memory used for crowds is a resource that isn't available to render the cars, the track, the players, or the field. The stuff that actually matters, the stuff that you're actually looking at while playing the game. The fact that they spend any development time on crowds shows an attention to detail that while I'm not sure is enitrely wise, certainly isn't lazy.

 

[Joel Olstein]

It's not a subject of technological limitation it's a subject of focuss of gameplay or rather focussing on what is important I beleav that if the crowds were rendered the same as the action on screen it would distract from the point of focuss

 

[blurredvision]

It's not a subject of technological limitation it's a subject of focuss of gameplay or rather focussing on what is important I beleav that if the crowds were rendered the same as the action on screen it would distract from the point of focuss

I don't believe that's it at all. The ultimate goal of sports games are to make them as realistic as possible, which includes the crowd, the heckles, the overall atmosphere of a game as we see it on television. When you're watching a basketball or football game on TV, does the crowd distract you from the game going on?