Interviews:Gateworld.net talks to Carl Coss

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

Interview at GateWorld

GateWorld: For GateWorld.net, I'm David Read here at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, and I'm here with the lead animator of Stargate Worlds, Carl Coss. Carl, thank you for being with us today.

Carl Coss: No problem! My pleasure.

GW: What are you working on today, by chance?

CC: Today I'm working on the Jaffa female walk.

GW: Ah! How long does something like that take?

CC: The initial animation will take a couple days depending on what it is. Some of the smaller loops could take less than a day. But a movement cycle, you want it to be really nice and smooth and look good because that's what you see all the time when you're moving.

GW: So this is just one walk cycle?

CC: Yeah. So it can take a couple days. But then you have to give that to every other character. You also have to do all of the characters. So it exponentially grows off of that one fundamental animation that you do.

GW: So let's say that she stops or turns right or turns around.

CC: Right. And just while the character's running, if a character starts to go left or right it has to blend with the other animations. So they go all the different directions and everything, and it all blends together. It looks like their feet are sticking.

GW: How many different alternates are there?

CC: Well, there's four directionals for every cycle, and then there's walk and run, and we possibly might have a sprint. But that's up to systems.

GW: Had you seen Stargate before coming here?

CC: I'd seen the movie. I saw it in the theater and I owned the DVD and loved it. I'm a big Kurt Russell fan. I did like the movie a lot. I don't watch a lot of TV. When I saw the show I would see clips of it or a friend watching, I was like "Ah, you know, a typical TV show ..." So I wasn't too into it. But interestingly enough, as soon as I got the job I was pretty excited to watch 'em.

GW: You had a reason to watch 'em!

CC: Yeah! And I wanted to know, too, because I wanted to be able to chat with people about it. And of course I should know, because I'm doing the animation for the game! So I started watching 'em. It didn't take long to really get into it. It's actually really well done. For all their production/budget deficits in the beginning, it's gotten really cool. The whole overall story arc is pretty epic, and I do like that. I think disconnected from the TV without the commercials and stuff -- I've been watching it on DVD, just in one sitting -- so it's more like a movie to me, and I think it helps too. I love it. And I'm watching Atlantis. So it's really exciting.

GW: What does your job involve on a day-in, day-out basis? You're also a manager.

CC: It depends on the day, yeah. There's a lot of meetings. I have to keep my animators busy and give them work. A lot of scheduling and meetings. I do like to do some animation myself if I can! I love to do it all the time.

At the same time it's really fun to be involved in all the management stuff and help direct the schedule so we can be on time for things and avoid working crazy hours, and then also to have a say in how it feels and be involved in those decision-making meetings, and be able to come up with the style of animation, how we're going to animate things like the Asgard and really how I think they should be, and present that and get the feedback from what everyone else thinks.

But day to day, there's as few scheduling meetings. We might have a meeting to decide something about the animation system, or the engineers need assistance to format our animations in a different way. Something like "Where are we going to keep the weapons? Are they stored on people's backs? In bags?" That kind of thing.

There's tons of decisions like that that go into all this stuff, and the animation system has to be pretty laid out. Like I said, for one movement for a walk cycle there's 30 or 40 animations that are based on that. So if you change something down the road you're changing hundreds of animations, and possibly your animation system.

So it's been an exciting challenge to come in here and start locking all that stuff down to get a more solid idea of everything we're going to need, so that way when unknowns do pop up they're not mind-shattering. Or world-shattering.

GW: One of the things that irritate me a little bit, being a World of Warcraft player myself: I'll stop in the middle of a territory and watch an NPC walk around. Let's take an alligator, for instance, like in Loch Modan. He's walking in one direction, and then he stops, and then he turns around instantly --

CC: -- pops, yeah --

GW: -- and walks the other way. Now, are we working to prevent that in our game?

CC: Well, where we can. One of the things I've seen in a lot of MMOs is there's a little less attention to detail because there's so much quantity. And that's definitely a challenge for us, too. But there's a lot of places you can hedge that back a little bit. So in an instance like that you might see that in our game. If we have 75 monsters to do, or more, and there's a limited amount of time. You're talking thousands of animations. You just can't have fill-in-little-gap animations for all of them like that.

But we can do things like make sure they have a turn or slide around or where a character's behavior will actually prevent it from actually flipping around all the way. Or, when you see characters that do things all the time -- the characters you see more and more basically will hopefully have less of that. We'll prioritize things as a percentage -- how often will you see this, how big of a part of the game will it be [in] -- and we'll flesh things out more that you'll see more often.

With the player characters we're trying to fill in most of that stuff, so they look really solid all the time.

GW: Yeah, I've seen some of your stuff. It already looks pretty stable. We're still a ways away.

CC: Yeah! It's going to be really telling when we see these things really working all the way in the game. There's going to be a lot of tweaking. But it's exciting to be getting stuff in there and start being able to work on that.

GW: Have any of your animations actually been applied to any of the realms yet?

CC: Yeah, you can run around as a couple of different characters. Some of the blending is not working, but we've started to see things in the game and put one or two of the monsters in there. But you can't actually play it yet. You can run around. So you can't see everything for sure. It's nice to see stuff in there.

But it's definitely apparent seeing things in the game is super important. Once you see things in the game there's stuff you want to change to make it look better. And a lot of stuff you can't actually say is 100 percent done until you see it in the game. And then you know, "OK, well I need to do this or this." Pull it back and then it can look really good.

GW: So you have to play it a lot.

CC: Well not necessarily play it, but transition. We'll watch them run, and then run left, and we'll watch how their feet go, and mess with the blending with those two animations and how they work together in every way. Standing, crouching, and all the different transitional stuff is what makes it believable.

It's like you said. When something "pops" like that it instantly pulls you out. So the more transitions, the more real it is. So having those in between working really well, invisible to the player, but just keeping them in the game is ideal. And that's stuff you can't really test until you have them all in there working together. Because we do them all separately.

GW: I doubt you're going to be able to drink a pint and not be able to walk in a straight line in this game.

CC: That's up to systems! It depends how much you're going to be able to do! If it's something that's a big part of the game --

GW: -- but are you prepared to animate, like if someone gets shot with a bullet they limp or cover that section?

CC: As far as the damage goes that's something that we just don't know yet. There's a lot of things that are more important to me before that. Basically it's a list of priorities. What can we do? What are we going to have time for? What's important to systems? What's important to content?

And damage is pretty cool, but at the same time a lot of the damage that's going to happen in this game is going to be far away. And if you get hit in a certain spot, but at the same time you're going to want to keep shooting. The attacks, a lot of the movement, a lot of how players stand and look around, the deaths, a lot of that stuff is a higher priority than damage, so we have a limited set of impacts right now when you get hit with stuff.

Again, we don't even know yet what it's going to look like in a fire fight. If somebody's getting sprayed with a machine gun do we need to do another animation for that, or can we use some of ours tuff and combine it, blend it? That kind of thing. It's all about getting the best quality in the time allotted.

GW: Well as long as you're well underway at this point.

CC: Yep!

GW: Good. Why do you think Stargate is worthy of an MMO?

CC: Oh, the same reason that it makes a great TV show. The Stargate. It's an instant story. You can go unlimited places and you can always have something new and cool. Even though they're always going back to the same place, a home base, they're going out and you never know what's out there. You can have these overall story arcs that are huge that encompass the whole galaxy, but you can have an isolated story just on a little planet.

A lot of MMOs, you have forests, mountains, plains, desert. Here we can have alien planets. You can be a short trek away from not only a whole different area but a whole different planet. A whole different species of monsters or people. A different color of sky. Planets. Different solar system. It opens it up visually, at least, for tons of cool stuff that other MMOs, I think, don't have. Story-wise it'll be easier to direct players through their own individual stories by using the gate.

GW: Like giving them a dialing address!

CC: Right! Right. So you can lock off places and then they can go to certain places, and you can have a more immersive story that way.

GW: So it's not just a matter of, like the NPC would say, "I believe it's in the north east" and you go and discover the country. Instead, "Here's an address, dial it, go."

CC: Yep. It's a great storytelling device, the Stargate. It's genius.

GW: Is there anything unique about working on this particular project as opposed to the ones you've done in the past?

CC: It's unique because this is one of the first things I've worked on that anybody's heard of, so that's cool. It's the biggest project I've worked on, and it's the most impressive company I've worked with, besides the one me and Howard had. But that was five of us.

It's a big deal and it's exciting. People have heard of it. Since I've really gotten attached to the show and the characters it's exciting to be part of that universe and adding some content to it. It is a first time for me for those reasons.

GW: What are some of the challenges you face day to day?

CC: Part of that is the management thing. It's bouncing, trying to keep my animators busy and keep working myself, but also get all these important decisions that need to be made underway. These are always dependent on other departments and people. I need to hear what they want and what they think. So it's a challenge every day to really press on even though they're still unknowns.

GW: You keep getting pulled away for meetings. There's really no way to have a real, "I'm in my groove now."

CC: I think I have a bunch of meetings, but I know Howard and a bunch of the other guys -- so I shouldn't probably even complain. But yeah, that is a challenge. To keep progressing while these decisions are being made simultaneously.

GW: Now you're responsible for managing three other people. Does management prevent you from doing -- let's be truthful here -- does it prevent you from doing as much of the animation as you would like to do yourself?

CC: Oh yeah. I mean, I'd like to do all of it! No. I think it's great to be able to balance out who's doing what. Everybody has something they don't want to do. Sometimes if it's stuff that I don't want to do somebody else will want to do. So we can all be happy pretty much all the time. I think that's a great part of it.

But no, I don't actually get to do as much as I'd like. It's a trade off. I do enjoy making those decisions and helping the game along with my opinions and the way I think it should look and feel. And adding that to it. I wouldn't get that chance if I was just animating all the time.

and I enjoy scheduling because I've worked in games a while. There's a lot of crazy management choices that some game companies make with scheduling and crazy hours. Ever since I've been able to help with scheduling, I've tried to make it so that doesn't happen, and help to schedule deadlines we can meet. It's awesome to be able to have that kind of input as well.

But yeah, it ebbs and flows. There's always the week where "Alright, once I get all this stuff done I can animate." I'm looking forward to it. But there are some days that go by where I don't get to do the animation.

GW: You obviously don't animate in a vacuum. In terms of the company you have to keep everyone up to date, but in terms of your source material where do you get your ideas? Where do you get your references?

CC: The best references for me, with just natural movement where I start, fundamentally, I just walk around. Or I do the action and keep track of what my body's doing and how it feels.

If we need to go to the next level we have a camera. We can film reference each other doing a certain motion and keep track of what's going on, go back to that and use it. But generally we just do it. I've done a lot of these things, a walk cycle, a run cycle, stuff for games. You can start with what's in your brain. I've walked it enough. But if it's a specific character or if I'm really having a problem with it, then yeah.

The first thing I do is get up and walk it myself, and say "What am I doing here?" and usually that's plenty. Beyond that, for something specific, like for Stargate, we'll watch the show. For the Asgard I was watching a lot of what they do to get the idea of what we can do and how far we can take that. And a lot of stuff with Teal'c, the fighting, we want it to feel like the show as well, but we're pushing the realism to a more stylized direction because I think that'll be more fun.

GW: Yeah! You can either follow the show to the letter or follow real life, or take it in a slightly stylized direction.

CC: Right. And I think in games people don't want real life. They're playing a video game. And I think you can go too far with that. But I think if you go just right -- you've got this Hollywood area where it's surreal, exaggerated, stylized to a point that's bigger and funner.

GW: Most of the races in Stargate are bipedal.

CC: Right. That means "two legs."

GW: Does this make things easier because it's a common form of locomotion, or more difficult because it's easier to spot flaws in terms of a player?

CC: Oh yeah, it's more difficult in that sense. Everybody's a critic when it comes to human motion. If you see a human walking in some computer-animated thing and it's bad, you know, even if you're not an animator. Because everybody knows how people walk. Even subconsciously. You've never thought about it before. Something's not right.

So it's difficult in that respect. But like I said, because a lot of them are similar we can transfer some of the base animations around, save time that way, and tweak the attitudes and proportions. Also it's easier because we can just get up and walk it.

Now if I have to do [an] eight-legged spider I can't just get up and go "How would a spider move?" I've got to really think about it or watch a bunch of videos. It's both. People are more critical about those things, but at the same time there's more resources available for us to use.

GW: Is there any particular kind of animation you're developing that's specific to Stargate that you've never developed before? The squiggly movements of a symbiote?

CC: There will be. We're going to do a symbiote, which is exciting. We're supposed to do that pretty soon. And the Jaffa with their pouches and everything. I've done a little bit of staff combat. There's more staff stuff. The firing from the staff is new. Because a lot of the people are human it is pretty standard, but when you get to the Asgard, I've never done anything like that. That's really exciting.

GW: That's really a level playing field. We've never even seen them fire a weapon. And we've only seen one shot once in Season Seven. So, yeah. I remember you contacting me a few weeks ago wanting to know where the switch on a staff weapon was. I thought that was really great! That detail.

CC: People are going to notice those things. And I personally respect what it is. We're doing Stargate so we need to do that kind of thing. And also it's important to get it right just in case other people at the company are going to see that later and say "Oh, go back to it." If we have time to figure that stuff out, and we're at the point where we can put that in, then yeah, absolutely. I like to find that stuff out. Make sure we're accurate in those counts. Because they do. It has a trigger.

Now whether or not they're always consistent with that in the show is a different story.

GW: Well, Chris Judge. He's always firing the staff weapon differently. Sometimes he'll hold it with two hands at his waist, or over --

CC: Or he'll tape two together and spin around and somehow fire them both.

GW: And hitting people with them!

CC: And in our game probably sometimes the handle will be in the wrong spot because of the blending. We'll try.

GW: The point is -- exactly. Pretty sick to be that minute about it. "They didn't get that right. The staff weapon's misplaced!"

CC: In an old version of the staff that we had, the hands were way up on it. It wasn't even ready. It was very funny. That's not going too far, the trigger on the staff. I want it to be Stargate. I don't want it to be something else.

GW: Are you pleased with the progress that your team has made so far?

CC: Oh, absolutely. And these guys, this is their first real game job. They are absolute pros already. It's awesome. I couldn't have three better animators. It's really been easy to give them stuff and let them do it. And they're really good about feedback, really good about working together and unifying the look of all the characters. It's been awesome.

GW: Do you plan on playing the game?

CC: Well, I do. Because I’m making it. I'll need to play it a lot just to test it, to look at the animations.

GW: Will you be sick of it by then, when it comes out?

CC: I'm excited to play it. There's so much going on and there's so many people working on this.

I have no idea a lot of times what other people are working on. What other departments are doing. I go and I walk around just to see that. Get a glimpse of the art and some of the content, and I read some of the stories. But I'll never be able to get as much of it as if I play it. I'm excited to play because there'll be things in there that I didn't know were in there, but that I'll know the people that made it. So it'll be exciting in that aspect.

I don't play a lot of MMOs. I just never got into them. But I have played some, and I like what we're doing here. How we're doing a lot of things differently. I want to see how it works. If I get more into it. So I'm interested in seeing what we create, but also seeing if it's fun. And it looks like it's going to be.