AnimationMerc

I've never actually answered this publicly but what the hell: why not?

It has a 1 in TEN THOUSAND chance of occurring and ONLY when reloading from empty (all 6 shots fired.)

When we released the Fall Patch, I worried that it would be rounded down to zero and would never occur. BleedingUranium was quite lucky to find it.

Uh oh, you're going to have hard questions, aren't you? I'm a big fan of Ubi's animation work!

1)We have weapon bones as part of the character skeleton/hierarchy. It's a child of the chest but with space switching in animation (makes sense for military shooters; I wouldn't do it this way for Assassin's Creed.) Hands are IK'd to the weapon.

2)Animations are separate between 1p and 3p. Both in data and stateflow. The latter is parallel but with unique considerations for perspective. For example, 1p doesn't need a hit react layer, 3p doesn't need ambient hand idles.

3)Most body awareness stuff is done specifically for first person. I don't think that any 3p animations are used on 1p except for on the lower body. But this part is outside my specialty; I may be wrong.

4)We use a combination of additive animation layers and specifically authored, weapon specific animations. For example, there is a sprint animation for all assault rifles that plays additively to each, individual rifle's sprint pose. But every reload animation is authored per-weapon.

5)They're very powerful tools! Like any aspect of gamedev, I'd love faster iteration times but that's true of almost every tool, especially powerful ones.

You're welcome!

The Unica easter egg came up because of all the unkind things some people said about the regular reload :P

So spite, I guess!

The way the Unica reload was implemented is a new trick to me but kind of cruel to you guys. Things like the Phantom program are complicated unlocks that require other people's work but it's really easy for me to add parameter that says "this animation has an X percentage chance of playing."

He really does, doesn't he? AA12s Akimbo!

Thanks! I get my hands on the actual weapons when I can but sometimes that's hard or impossible to do. Whether I get to shoot the real weapon or not, manufacturer's videos are useful reference. Sometimes when a weapon is super rare (like with the MK3A1 in Battlefield) the only real reference I could find was the blueprint!

Picking the "best" reload is about picking something that is practical and mechanically correct first of all, then visually interesting (like using the HK slap on the F2000; it's correct but not required.)