Counter to every video i showed demonstrating the inability of the games you cited to even hold a fucking candle to the facial emotion used by HL2
LOL! You cite videos which contain a grainy minute or two from each game which were not designed as a demonstration of the visual ability in question and suddenly declare definitively that those games don't have ANY facial animation or lipsynching comparable to Half-Life 2. The NOLF video you cited was even five years old and from the first game not the second one. Pot, you are pitch black.
Could it be you weren't able to experience all of what this system had to offer because you didn't play the game all the way through to be able to form an accurate opinion,
My opinion is accurate for the portion of the game I have played. I mentioned many times that I had not played the whole game through, but what I have seen has been decent but not unique and certainly not worthy of the hype. I also have yet to see that scene from the screenshots in the game. The screenshots show emotions on the faces, but it's still not like something I have not seen in a game before.
Produce something already.
Right now I only have one game installed with a single-player component. It's Tron 2.0. It has very good lipsynching and some good facial animation in the cutscenes especially for a game which is a little over two years old. And despite the age difference, it is comparable to Half-Life 2's although Half-Life 2 does has better character textures which give the faces a more realistic look. I have a couple of video clips which highlight some good emotive facial expressions and lipsynching. You can download them at
http://rapidshare.de/files/5042184/Tron_2.0_Clip__1.wmv.htmland
http://rapidshare.de/files/5042239/Tron_2.0_Clip__2.wmv.htmlThe first one is of a speech followed by a very menacing look by Crown, one of the villains in the game.
The second clip is of the digitized Jet Bradley worriedly asking Ma3a about his father.
Because these videos are of very low fps, the best way to see the scenes is to load up the game yourself. The following command lines will load and play the scenes directly:
lithtech.exe -rez GAME -rez GAME2.rez -rez gamep5.rez -rez gamep6.rez +runworld "WORLDS\RETAILSINGLEPLAYER\M07-03.DAT"
for the first one and
lithtech.exe -rez GAME -rez GAME2.rez -rez gamep5.rez -rez gamep6.rez +runworld "WORLDS\RETAILSINGLEPLAYER\M03-01.DAT"
for the second scene.
Tron 2.0 character models have about a dozen facial bones used for the animation. I don't know how many Half-Life 2's models have (since Valve locks up the SDK in Steam whereas almost all other games with SDK's have freely downloadable ones which don't require gigabytes of storage space and online authentication or even the purchase of the game in many cases), but these bones provide plenty of animation possibilities and they are used quite a bit.
I have some more scenes in mind from other games, but I have to install them, locate the scenes, and make movies which takes time. The bottom line is if you think Half-Life 2 is the only game which "conveys emotion through facial expression" or lipsynching then you simply haven't played many other games or you are too blindingly loyal to Valve or both.
This comment was edited on Sep 13, 05:36.