Talk:Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

A SLING on the rifle!

Some people might not think this is anything to nod about but seeing so many Uncharted games and even recently the MGS5 gameplay trailers...I see a fucking sling on the SIG rifle that Drake takes and uses. He throws it to his back and we actually see the weapon's sling! See how hard is that Konami? I am weird out that Snake is carrying around his rifle dangling in the air like there SHOULD be a sling and motion capture for Snake most likely did but they couldn't animate a sling because some say it might be too hard and here's Uncharted having one. Excalibur01 (talk) 20:57, 6 December 2014 (EST)

I don't see any sling. You sure you aren't confusing Drake's shoulder holster for one? Spartan198 (talk) 23:06, 6 December 2014 (EST)

I saw the sling too. You can see it hanging below the rifle when he fires it and when he talks to his brother at the end of the gameplay trailer. It's a beige sling going across his chest which contrasts with the brown shoulder rig he's wearing. Sorry I don't have an image, I can't screencap to save my life. Also worth pointing out, the 1911A1 he picks up holds 9 rounds so it must replace the Colt Defender from the previous games. --Bad Boy (talk) 01:32, 7 December 2014 (EST)

Ah, I see. Well, I still feel slings to be a largely unnecessary detail due to the amount of programming needed to make them "work" that otherwise doesn't add anything to gameplay. In as many third person shooters as I've played since the days of PS1, I've never even noticed the absence of a sling. Spartan198 (talk) 03:06, 8 December 2014 (EST)

A sling isn't that hard to do if you're treating it like it's nailed to the character's shoulder (you can just point one handle on the character model and two others on the gun and use them to define its length) and you could use canned animations for it swinging around rather than physics if you want (the cut animations in MGS Rising are all pre-made because they couldn't get a dynamic system to work), but yeah, it'd be quite a lot of work to get a proper sling with physics. It's the same reason a lot of lazy FPS games use wheeled vehicles instead of tracked ones, and nobody tries to make tank treads with modelled individually articulated links (they usually just use a scrolling texture and a bump map). Evil Tim (talk) 03:35, 8 December 2014 (EST)

Then tell me, how often did you pay attention to the treads on Lazarevic's T-62 as it was demolishing that Tibetan village in Uncharted 2? Or were you like me and too preoccupied with the fact that it was shooting at everything that moved? Just like articulated tank treads, it's a nice detail but still largely unnecessary and doesn't really add anything to the game because nobody's going to pay much attention to it. Unless you intend to play through the game staring at the sling the entire time. Spartan198 (talk) 11:03, 8 December 2014 (EST)

I'm with you that it is unnecessary, but like you say it is a nice touch, and Naughty Dog is good at putting small little details into their games that if you don't keep your eyes you for you will miss. Either way I don't see why anyone would be against this small touch being in the game, unless they intend to have it hold real world properties and make it so you can snag it on a protruding branch or something. (Which personally I think would add much more tension to tough gun fights, but also be annoying as hell if it wasn't to be programmed exactly right).RedRobinAlpha (talk) 01:00, 9 December 2014 (GMT

To be fair, they did kind of draw your attention to the treads in that part where you'd shimmying along the ledge and it decides the best way to scare you is to almost drive off a cliff :P And they are known for some wonderfully unnecessary flourishes like the procedurally generated ocean in the ship level of Uncharted 3, or the sand physics later on (which were also used in Journey). Evil Tim (talk) 21:07, 8 December 2014 (EST)

An accurately-modelled, dynamically animated sling for a long gun that moves realistically requires a lot of work for not much benefit, as I've said before. You need (an incomplete list follows below):

• A collision system around the body of the character, the gun, and the sling itself (to stop it from passing through itself).
• A physics system to make it move around realistically under its own weight (given how many videos there are out there showing ingame physics engines bugging out, this isn't easy).
• Stock animations (such as putting the long gun on your back or bringing it to the ready) and a way to make sure that the dynamic animations don't interfere with the stock ones.

A rather substantial amount of work for a small element. --Mazryonh (talk) 17:42, 4 January 2015 (EST)

Again, though, this is the same team that put procedurally generated waves in Uncharted 3 and made sure every object on the cruise liner moved in relation to the angle of the deck rather than just having them slide back and forth on fixed tracks. Evil Tim (talk) 18:49, 4 January 2015 (EST)

Try looking at this older video showing the Joker from the Arkham series. At around 10 seconds you can see the chain near his left thigh suddenly pop out of his 3D model (whereas before it was invisible). That's what can easily happen with a dynamic sling model that isn't rigorously bugtested and doesn't have exhaustive collision boxes. As for making objects in a level slide around due to waves outside, assuming your physics engine and hardware can handle it, wouldn't it largely be a matter of programming in a sequence for the direction of gravity to change in a regular pattern, and then have individual objects procedurally move around depending on their assigned masses, collision boxes, and friction values? --Mazryonh (talk) 03:06, 19 January 2015 (EST)

That sounds a lot easier than it is, having objects move dynamically on other objects is really hard (for example, it's really hard to do something as simple as put something in the back of a flatbed and drive it, because the engine tends to think the truck is crashing into the object: Crysis has that problem). You have to deal with things like the way the engine prevents objects clipping inside each other by aggressively trying to kick them out (this is why objects sometimes get launched into the air, and why exploits like this are possible even in 2D games). Just keeping the objects moving on the deck without them boinging around like bouncy balls would have been a nightmare. The hardest thing with a proper sling would actually be stopping it constantly pinging off Nathan's body, for the same reason. Keeping it out of his body wouldn't be a huge problem if they have something like physics modelling for pusing 3D foliage out of Nathan's way as he moves (which they almost certainly will).

The old consoles skipped out on a lot of physics stuff for memory reasons, EDF 2025 goes nuts with physics (spent casings will slide downhill and skip up into the air if they hit a dip, glass spraying out of a blasted window will bounce off other buildings, etc) and it tanks its framerate constantly despite using some pretty low-grade textures for a last-gen console game. Evil Tim (talk) 03:18, 19 January 2015 (EST)

I see, it's just that free sandbox physics games for the PC (like "Truck Dismount" and "Stair Dismount") have featured realistic physics behaviour (including inelastic collisions, which the Crysis bug you mention seems to have a problem with) since the early 2000s. Granted, those two games feature very small environments (nowhere near the size of a typical game level) and no textures, but it proved it was possible early on. One other early example of "lots of individual objects subject to ingame physics" can be found in Metal Gear Solid 2, specifically with shell casings. If many bullets are fired (most easily seen with Iroquois Pliskin if you antagonize him just after Raiden first meets him), all the shell casings will collect on the ground and still be subject to ingame physics so as long as they haven't completely come to a stop. They can actually pile up to a pretty surprising amount, a level of detail I haven't seen since in gaming. --Mazryonh (talk) 02:45, 20 January 2015 (EST)

MGS2 is kind of special, there's also two wine coolers in that game most people won't even notice which have ice in them, and someone on the team made a dynamic model for ice melting which bases the rate on the proximity of other ice cubes. Evil Tim (talk) 02:57, 20 January 2015 (EST)

Wrong Reloading Animation!?

Does it bother anyone else that Drake reloads the SIG as if it has an AK style mag release, (pressing the fresh magazine against the release and then knocking the empty one off with one motion) when the SG556 has a button release housed above the trigger guard? (I've watch closely and he doesn't press the release before doing so.) I am however loving the small addition of racking the bolt after picking up the rifle. RedRobinAlpha (talk) 01:00, 9 December 2014 (GMT

No more than it bothered me in the previous four Uncharted games. They've always used AK-based animations for all assault rifles. Spartan198 (talk) 02:40, 9 December 2014 (EST)

Hasn't the whole focus of the series been on the "high adventure" aspect rather than the combat and firearms accuracy? It would be nice to see more accurate animations in future installments, but that's unlikely given that this is supposed to be the last one for Nathan Drake. --Mazryonh (talk) 17:15, 4 January 2015 (EST)

Because the older consoles had very little in the way of RAM and slow loading, they tended to take a lot of shortcuts: one frequent one was reusing animations in third-person games, as with Nico Bellic using the same hand positions for every weapon of a given type. Two weapon inventory in shooters was for that reason too, so the game only had to have two high-res weapon models loaded at once (the MGR: Revengeance team said the reason there's no quick-select for weapons in that game is they had to pause it to dump the old weapon's files out of memory or the game would crash). So in theory they shouldn't have to use one reference animation for all ARs anymore. Evil Tim (talk) 17:35, 4 January 2015 (EST)

Do you mean reload animations from just 3rd-person shooter games in general, or do you include FPS games as well? The oldest third-person-perspective game I know of that had 2 reload animations for its guns is Silent Hill 3, and that was originally a PS2 game. Other older FPS games (especially of the tactical variety, such as SWAT 4) have had 2 reload animations as well, albeit those are mostly for the PC--Mazryonh (talk) 02:00, 19 January 2015 (EST).

IIRC Silent Hill 3 only has three weapons which even have reloading animations, so it can splurge a little; I was thinking more about games like the Quantum of Solace one, where every single two-handed gun has a foregrip so they can use the same cover poses for all of them. I imagine it's the same with sharing animations between guns; if you just use the same one, you don't have to keep going "ok, what will this look like behind each piece of cover, when walking, when running..." and that would save a lot of memory since you'd have to load all of those in case the player did them. Evil Tim (talk) 03:47, 19 January 2015 (EST)

I would have thought that "two ranged weapons only" gameplay mechanic was a small nod towards realism (most people aren't anywhere near strong enough to carry two full-size long guns and "enough" ammunition for both, plus full kit). I suppose the takeaway from SH3 is that multiple reload animations in a console game are perfectly possible, assuming they are a priority for the development team. The Xbox 360 had only 512 MB of RAM and the PS3 had only 256 MB RAM (in an age where gigabytes of RAM for PCs was rather cheap), so I suppose that was one of the limiting factors for multiplatform games like MGR:R. Still, I remember Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 had customizable loadouts for guns and 2 FPV reload animations for most of them (even ones that didn't really need it, such as for the Taurus Raging Bull). I never played the console versions of Vegas 2, but if separate reload animations were visible in 3PV in that game's multiplayer, then you could end up with a lot of reload animations in memory, or even more if players could loot weapons from fallen players (as has been standard for multiplayer FPSes for a long time). --Mazryonh (talk) 02:19, 20 January 2015 (EST)

Eh, two full-sized weapons perhaps, but that doesn't really explain the whole "pistol is the same size as a rocket launcher" or games that let you carry all the weapons but still rotate them into a two-slot inventory. I think with multiplayer they scrimp on world detail to save memory, multiplayer maps are rarely much to look at compared to the same game's single player.

With Uncharted, though, you have a ton more character animations because Nathan doesn't just military his way around the place, he can jump and roll and the like, plus he has things like the brutal melee animations, mantling, climbing, etc, and he's in single player so you've got a lot of pretty level textures eating through a very limited amount of RAM (I think PS3 does have another 256 megs of graphics RAM, so it's not quite that bad, but still, one of the reasons console Far Cry is so cut down is the original wanted 1 gig of RAM and a 256 meg graphics card for max settings). In that case I can forgive them things like using mirrored left / right reloads so Nathan keeps pulling charging handles that aren't there, but I'd be surprised if they kept doing that with eight gigs of RAM to play with, that'd just be lazy. Evil Tim (talk) 03:04, 20 January 2015 (EST)

Yes, I hope that Naughty Dog will make full use of the PS4's resources. Still, as Silent Hill 3 proves, it can happen if it's a priority. --Mazryonh (talk) 00:08, 7 March 2015 (EST)

One thing I appreciate is that in the most recent gameplay demo they've added a lefthanded reload animation for the AK, as opposed to mirroring the animation and having nate cock a non existent charging handle. Another nice little touch in an amazing looking game.--One shot is all it takes. (talk) 13:52, 15 August 2015 (EDT)