Expanded Galaxy Mod

[kinkojiro]

Jan 24, 2017 23:05:04 GMT sil said:

Why does Tali seem bald now? That's a neat looking look for her.

Like all the other players with helmets - her hair is inside. The hood is purely an affectation. Mellin wanted to create something a bit different than just a retexture of an existing armor. As somebody pointed out on reddit it is quite appropriate for an exile Tali.

Beyond Miranda Mod, is there anything else in the pipeline for EGM that you can talk about yet? I'm curious to know what direction you're taking it in.

Miranda mod we are stuck with 2 things. FaceFX is a real nightmare - despite the huge improvements in the toolkit. When editing a new phrase a new you have to move every single node (can be hundreds for a single line). When copying a line from ME2 the FaceFX is entirely different - nobody AFIK has worked out how to translate ME2 faceFx into ME3 facefx. So we have maybe 6 or 7 lines we have copied from ME2 where we need to find a solution.

Secondly the writing - as you may know I struggle to do this well. My usual editors are busy so I am left trying to improve it. By EGM standards there is not a huge amount of writing - but with the Team assignment - enough for me to find very time consuming.

The extra content released yesterday was entirely driven by the artists. They are talking about doing some extra armors for other squadmates, but nothing firm yet.

So to answer your question - beyond that nothing I am willing to discuss. Andromeda will be out soon, so I doubt we will be actively adding things to EGM post launch.

[giftfish]

Jan 25, 2017 0:27:52 GMT kinkojiro said:

Miranda mod we are stuck with 2 things. FaceFX is a real nightmare - despite the huge improvements in the toolkit. When editing a new phrase a new you have to move every single node (can be hundreds for a single line). When copying a line from ME2 the FaceFX is entirely different - nobody AFIK has worked out how to translate ME2 faceFx into ME3 facefx. So we have maybe 6 or 7 lines we have copied from ME2 where we need to find a solution.

This I wasn't aware of. My impression was that @sircyxrtyx thought it worked to pull from ME2 to ME3 and said so in the release notes. If it doesn't, then we likely need to report it in the GitHub thread for all the FaceFX stuff.

[giftfish]

Quick follow up.

Yeah, here's what was in the release notes for 2.0.11:

FaceFxEditor

Edit ME2 Files
Import from ME2 -> ME3 (experimental)
Delete keyframes with the Delete key

So, if certain/all things aren't working, we need to report.

Something we'll have to investigate further is if it's not working for all FXEs, just those with phonemes/without phonemes, etc.

[kinkojiro]

giftfish  the problem isn't a toolkit one.  ME2 facefx opens/edits fine. It is a bioware one.  I can't remember what deager called them - phenomes?  anyway they are largely different between ME2/3.

Left is a typical ME3 line, right a typical ME2.    The toolkit easy copies between the games, it is just ME3 doesn't recognise the ME2 actions.



I guess there is a table somewhere in the main game files that translates the FaceFX phenomes onto bones.

[giftfish]

kinkojiro -- Phonemes, yes.

This is interesting, though.

ME3 actually uses both phonemes and offset bones; it depends on the speaker's race. Aliens like turians and drell use the offset bones directly, like you see for Miranda in ME2. For example, all of Thane's lines in ME3 look like Miranda's in ME2. Humans, on the other hand, use almost exclusively phonemes in ME3. Apparently this is something else BW changed between games.

FYI, the "Stern" type stuff is the robobrad. Automatically generated facial expressions from pre-set settings in FaceFX.

The phonemes table is something that might be in the FaceFXAsset? It's also possible that it's something that is stripped out of the files, entirely. I remember  researching this bit last summer when doing my initial testing on the romance scene and coup radio call. I found something in the FaceFX documentation that indicated not everything is baked into the game files. Hopefully, that isn't the case.

[deager]

giftfish - She found the term, because it involved reading.

kinkojiro - While I never even tried to drag and drop from ME2 to ME3, the way I got around this was to find phrases when possible from other lines in ME3 by humanoid characters, and then manually match them up. This is where my background in character animation probably was handy as key frames (or points) are in my wheelhouse. It's doable, but incredibly tedious. That's why each edited line took an average of 1 hour to do.

[kinkojiro]

It looks like the tables are in BIOG_FaceFX_Assets.pcc. They are done by race which makes sense. In ME2 it looks like the default FaceFX asset for human male is in SFXGame

If any of the more code literate modders want to take a look at BIOG_FaceFX_Assets they might be able to decipher it and see whether we can add back the ME2 actions into ME3.

[kinkojiro]

For those interested this is how the Lazarus convo plays out.  Hardly a masterpiece, but it will do. 



There are 2 lines where the FaceFX is yet to be done.

"He wouldn't let us do anything that might limit your potential in any way."

This is an ME2 line with the ME2 faceFX. All the lip movements don't work, head gestures do.  deager - how do you even start to find alternative lines to copy the facefx?  Just from memory?  Is it the words or syllables that are important?

"When the Collectors showed up we needed to contain the situation."

This is cut from 3 different ME3 lines. I could manually cut the FaceFX together, but it would involve a lot of calculating in my head for hundreds of different points.  If a cut and paste was available it would make things like this it a huge amount simpler.

[kainprime]

Jan 24, 2017 9:15:50 GMT kinkojiro said:

So some small updates to EGM today - mostly driven by the art department:

- New squad GUI textures rendered by patadepocho.
- @mellin has created a pack of 4K HR textures for the cargo deck vehicles.
- @mellin also created a entirely new armor set for Tali.   It has different look - hood down - a bit like a short haircut.  This armor is in addition to her existing ones (so now she has 4 armors rather than 3).



In addition some minor bugs were fixed (in particular one that could prevent the Normandy streaming properly after a video conference).

Updates on nexus

Neat. Hopefully we'll get something similar for Javik. He desperately needs some alternate outfits. Perhaps something inspired by the concept art.

And maybe we'll see a proper unmasking scene for Tali at some point too.

[viper]

kinkojiro

Yeah I think it will do fine.Convo looks great,you implemented all the ideas we had thank you.Conversation feels natural and now attacking Cerberus with Miranda on our side seems perfect but I get you about FaceFX thing,all this talk about game files had me excited I wish I can help with it.I'm so inspired now I think I may even read the entire me3explorer wikia

[sil]

Secondly the writing - as you may know I struggle to do this well. My usual editors are busy so I am left trying to improve it. By EGM standards there is not a huge amount of writing - but with the Team assignment - enough for me to find very time consuming.

If you need any help with editing, I can always take a little look. I can't guarantee loads of time as I've got my mod and my novel to write, but I can attempt to provide some tweaks if needs be.

[deager]

Jan 25, 2017 7:18:37 GMT kinkojiro said:

"When the Collectors showed up we needed to contain the situation."

This is cut from 3 different ME3 lines. I could manually cut the FaceFX together, but it would involve a lot of calculating in my head for hundreds of different points.  If a cut and paste was available it would make things like this it a huge amount simpler.

This was my process.

First, Jaw+ followed closing by m_O (I think it was m_O) are the most significant for making the mouth actually open and move and stuff. If I got those two things correct, mostly the animation looked just fine before I did a bunch of fine tuning on other things.

Second, to answer your question, when an ME3 phrase wasn't used, the most important thing I could find was the phrase being said. As many words in order as possible was the most important. Even if the person is yelling in the line you find as an example, just tweak down the Jaw+ and that can solve a lot of trouble. If the line timing is too different, then using the equivalent of Jaw+ from the ME2 line view gives you the road map to base all other animations off of.

Third, if you can't get the phrases, then I would use the ME2 "Jaw+" as my guide and then find the words within sentences elsewhere in ME3 to use as reference and manually adjust the other phonemes around the Jaw+ timing. It's not as clean and awesome as the real deal but I could get stuff done fairly well that way.

So syllables you want to grab from ME2 for timing and then finding the actual words, or even better, phrases, from ME3 can round out the rest.

It's still really tedious though.

[giftfish]

Jan 25, 2017 4:28:03 GMT kinkojiro said:

It looks like the tables are in BIOG_FaceFX_Assets.pcc. They are done by race which makes sense. In ME2 it looks like the default FaceFX asset for human male is in SFXGame

If any of the more code literate modders want to take a look at BIOG_FaceFX_Assets they might be able to decipher it and see whether we can add back the ME2 actions into ME3.

The assets in that file are actually identical to the individual FaceFXAsset exports inside each main PCC with a localized counterpart. For example, the HumanFemale asset in there is identical to the one in Miranda's CitHub file:



In this example, I'm assuming the game will use the one in Miranda's file, and not the one in the BIOG_FaceFX_Assets.pcc... but I don't know that for certain.

I asked Sir about the ability to edit these exports a while back as part of the workflow for dialogue, and he indicated he didn't think it was necessary. Could be that we will need a form of "translation" for importing across games though. Comparing ME2 and ME3 Assets, there might be a problem even with the races that don't use phonemes, b/c the layout of the hex in asset itself is much different.

I'll post some info in the tool thread, rather than go into that here

[kingferaligatr]

This mod continues to impress. Great job and keep up the work, kinko and team. If you need someone to run ideas by or to give ideas to you, I'm here.

[avpen]

Jan 25, 2017 0:27:52 GMT kinkojiro said:

Secondly the writing - as you may know I struggle to do this well. My usual editors are busy so I am left trying to improve it. By EGM standards there is not a huge amount of writing - but with the Team assignment - enough for me to find very time consuming.

I'm still planning on sending you an email about some of the writing elements I looked at from the Miranda Mod's TLK, Kinko - been busy here and there, to quote from a movie "Sh*t Happens". lol - but needless to say, I have some very major concerns (especially lore concerns) regarding two of the characters that you added into Miranda's new content.... I think you can probably guess who those two are, lol.