Sure, but it's pleasing to the eye to not see something in motion or flight that could possibly ruin immersion. However, occasional glitches are inevitable. As long as the dragons soar through the sky majestically MOST the time, I'm fine.

Actually he cut down to the left and to me it didn't look bad in fact i didn't even notice it and again there still in the Alpha stage of development and improvements can be done.

Why are there even people who are arguing that the maneuver in question does not look jerky? I thought that this is obvious and only a matter of unfinished/unfixed animation.

I feel like this entire thread is kind of pointless. Some people think the dragon flight could use improvement, some people think it's fine. There are eight pages of this. I am unsure why.

No you are not saying that. The falling towards the ground is the turn that the dragon does. It's just the scenario rotated around by 90 degrees. No one cares whether the boeing can or cannot pull out of a steep dive. That is a complete strawman, as was the original comment on dragons not needing to flap their wings because their magic meant they ignored aerodynamics.

You are talking about aerodynamics. Everything to do with how the dragon is kept in the air is aerodynamics. It's in the air because of it's magic. Cool, end of story. The OP WAS NEVER debating ANYTHING about levitation, and I would expect he doesn't care how it is flying. Sorry but if you take an antigravity device, and put it on a rocket that rocket is not going to be able to jerk all over the sky like a mad thing, and it is not going to be able to jerk it's way through a left turn. The topic for debate is whether or not the changing of the dragon's vector is such as to look unrealistic compared to the animations the dragon does. The animation very clearly takes a normal maneuver which it has been programmed to do, and then something in the code realises that it can't follow that vector so it unrealistically adjusts the vector to avoid the inevitable crash. The same thing can be seen in the video I linked when the dragon just stops moving forward completely and drops out of the air, which you can't see. I'd be interested to know if you had actually watched either video or just jumped into the debate picking up the completely pointless statements from the first few posters.


You are completely correct with this statement. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with Lore. It is a game animation. The "dragons don't flap their wings often enough" was something that was never part of the argument. The argument has nothing to do, whatsoever, with the aerodynamics of how they fly. It has to do with the vector of the sprite changing suddenly without the sprite going through the animations that would be expected. In the same way that the diagonal oblivion walking animation was wrong, or that characters could change directions in mid air after jumping so that they ended up back where they had begun. In the same way that a car in Gran Turismo doesn't make a 90 degree turn instantly because there is another car in the way.



Voyrin, I'm not sure what game experience you have, but I can not think of many games where the AI does well with what you are talking about. There are many games where the AI can't predict that it is going to crash into an object and just crashes into it regardless, even if it has just had 1km of clear area and the obstacle has been in front of it and should have been detected for that entire 1km. So most of the time, the AI just awkwardly collides with the object and either clips into the object or goes bananas until it is no longer colliding, instead of the AI acting as it should. To be honest, despite the occasional jerky movements I'm glad that they have done the animations the way they have - it prevents awkward dragon clipping through objects, getting stuck trying to fly between two objects and colliding with both and other things that would have looked a LOT worse. Besides, it also keeps the dragons movement unpredictable and different in each fight.

People are opinionated and a lot of them feel very strongly about theirs ~_~

Now I understand what you mean!
Yes, ive seen the videos, or at least one of them, the one which link worked.
Honestly, I didnt see the sprites behaving awkwardly.
That one turn that people talk about, some people have said that it may only look like that because of point of view, and I tend to agree.
I cant really make a judgement on this though until I have played the game, as I feel that demo videos are too far removed from the actual gameplay experience to really notice this kind of thing well.

A strawman? I just extended your metaphor, Im not the one who brought it up:/

What I did see though was a two ton animal moving with the grace of a hummingbird.
That is what I mean when I say they do not behave as physics would dictate and I believe that dragons being able to maneuvre like that has to do with gameplay.
Its simply more fun if an aerial opponent has the ability to hover, swoop, turn and engage the PC at close quarters, than it would be if it couldnt do all these things, and physics says they cannot.
As I said, that lore supports dragons assisting their flight through magical means is a happy coincidence.

Something that big and heavy would never fly with wings that small. Just accept it. Though I would like to see the dragons flapping thier wings more.

The History Channel begs to differ ;p

I'm really hoping the dragons will be able to pick the PC up and drop us for MASSIVE damage, as well as shake us around in his mouth and toss us to the side like he did with that guard.

You have a very good point there.

YES!!!! We GOT there! HIGH FIVE BRO!
Do you want a paracetamol? I've got a full on headache now.

I agree to be honest, it's something which looks like it could be an issue but is unlikely to be proven to be unless you test it in game, and in this case I imagine that Bethesda have organised the game world and dragon behavior to prevent the inability to avoid collision/take reasonable steps to make the collision avoidance looking good from being too much of an issue. The only issue so far is that it appears that Dragons can't attack you if you are standing behind them (or at least, don't intuitively attack you by tail whipping you) Looks like a potential blind spot to take advantage of to me.

To your last points, True true.

Sorry, remember when you said something was a strawman in another topic? Well I hadn't learned about it until then. I thought a strawman was a misrepresentation of the opponents position - so in that case, wouldn't the extension of the metaphor be a strawman, if it was incorrect? More likely it was just a misunderstanding, but bro, you gave me a fancy new word. I just had to try it out.

Sounds good, if only they could do that in first person. But you have to admit, Booty, that you enjoy dying in games a lot more than the majority might.

The Romans certainly did have spelling and spaces. Without those things you don't have words. What they didn't have was punctuation and syntax. Grammar in Latin is built into the words themselves, via conjugation of verbs and declension of nouns, with proximity determining what word modified what.

Your point still stands, though. If you don't bother to spell properly then you just look like an idiot.

You can look like an idiot while spelling properly. I do it frequently.

My 2 cents on this subject.

Lets just compare them to a plane (i know different wings and all that but bare with me)

A plane uses it's wings and tail end for stability, where the propulsion comes from the jet engines, with out the wings it crashes horribly.

using the same things.

A Dragon uses it's wings for stability, where it's main form of propulsion comes from the magic within it, with out wings for stability it will crash horribly.


A jet fighter, which itself weighs quite a bit, can still turn rather rapidly.

A dragon using magic has a myriad of powers which could help with this. Feather Spell for instance, lightening it's weight during flight for swift movements.


In a world with magic and physics, it become hard to explain exactly WHY, but using whats in the lore and whats in game, it becomes easier to deduce.

Agreed.

:lmao: I just enjoy the feeling of satisfaction from getting through a tough challenge. I'm hoping the first time we see a dragon the only way to survive is RUN...LIKE...HELL!

when youre a made up creature to begin with, physics dont mean [censored]
just use your imagination
its a fantasy game
the "dragons are too heavy to fly this gracefully in real life, this is a stupid game!" threads are getting a tad bit old

From the preview write ups, seems it wight turn out like that. I don't think entering Bleak Falls was what you might call a choice, rather a necessity. Maybe that fast levelling might be necessary to have a chance against it when you come out the other side.

Hey. If they give enemies epic deaths, they should give us epic deaths as well. The menu should appear fairly quickly somewhere (I hate nothing more than watching my character being dead, especially if he is just lying on the ground motionless for 10 seconds as the camera pans out), but then a cutscene should play out of our death. On a loop. So if we miss a detail we can see how epic it is.


...

Not the answer I was hoping for. Ah well.

Bees svck (I'm allergic to them). On that note, dragons are total face wreckers and can fly however they want to fly.

Im certainly no expert on the subject. Also, it was somewhat of a dissapointentment to realise in later life that a lot of stuff teachers in school taught us was simply wrong. I hope this is not one of those things, but you never know.
Anyway, I was taught that on the clay tablets the Romans used for day-to-day things they did not use spaces, this to conserve writing space on the tablet. I was taught that this made an archeologists job more difficult, as they had to figure out where words ended and began, since romans also solely used capital letters.

Of course, you are quite correct on what you point out on grammar.
I have read that if mankind ever were to meet aliens, a likely language to first try to communicate in would probably be Latin, as Latin is very close to math in regard to how it is structured. Logical, predictable.
Unlike for instance English, which is sort of a hotch-potch of languages and where spelling is mostly convention.
So the Roman example is wrong, but still, Shakespeare isnt even consistent in how he spells his own name. The convention of spelling does serve a purpose.
Terry Pratchett once wrote English is the sort of language that mugs other languages in a dark ally, and I thought that was a funny way to put it.

My own spelling can hardly be called perfect, I use what I call the ballistic approach. Meaning I sort of point at my goal, fire, and hope for the best.
But at least I make an effort and I am always happy to learn new things.
(Twenty years of using English and only three months ago I find out that the only correct spelling is 'which', Id been writing 'wich' for years..)

Just about everything in TES defies physics on Earth. Like shooting lightning, fire, frost etc. from your hands? Fire breath? Glass swords that can be used in battle? Amber bows that don't snap under the pressure? TES takes place on another planet, I always assumed it was just a more plausible scenario because of that. Human didn't evolve with an innate ability to do those things. That's not to say they are physically impossible feats on other worlds, but it is unnatural according to our physiology and on the planet Earth.

This might sound silly, but I sort of like to imagine Nirn exists in the same universe as Earth, but in a far away system on a planet where those things might occur more naturally. So when I look up at the night sky in Oblivion, I think sometimes which of those stars is our sun. In that sense, it's not only a fantasy rpg for me, but a sci-fi rpg as well.

Did you even read the thread? What a [censored]..