There are some non-humanoid skeletons in the game I see. Make a Warframe with one of them? The humanoid frames are starting to blur together.

[Skaale]

We have got these skeletons at least. 

• Kubrow/kavat skeltons.
• Not sure if Tagfer is has his own, but it's definately something. 
• Bird 3
• There's a few other birds.
• What are those sand creatures on Mars? 
• Some of the bosses seem to have interesting skeletons. 
• I would mention Moas, but I really don't need a legs only frame lmao nvm I do
• Any other wacky shapes I'm forgetting? Oro worms? 

The point is that there's allot of crazy shapes to be had, and I want to see them happen. 

[Nekomian]

The issue isn't that they can't design or make a frame with a non-humanoid skeleton, but rather it would need to be rigged from scratch and it would work with none of the existing animations or stances. Enemies & specialized models (like bird 3 as an example) have a limited set of motions they do. They don't have to use any helminth ability, hold guns, use melee and melee stances, and/or equip the tons of cosmetics available.

So, it would be starting all over from scratch, and none of your cosmetics or weapons would work until they go through all 1000s of the items individually to check for clipping and position them accordingly, if that's even possible. The idea is cool, but the execution of it would be a massive overhaul for little other than "whoa, that's different".

[(XBOX)CaligulaTwily]

It'd have to be a temporary 4 ability or something. Xakus 4 gets rid of all their cosmetics, and Tenno flip out and get angry over that.

Edited January 4 by (XBOX)CaligulaTwily

[Numerounius]

Relevant thread about this discussion, you can check there to see some discussion on this topic already:

My comment from it that also applies here:

I'd say that having a Warframe that is not humanoid/bipedal probably isn't going to happen. But I can for sure see an ability on a frame where you control an external mechanic like a beast within or similar to how you can with Orowyrm.

[Skaale]

8 minutes ago, Numerounius said:

Relevant thread about this discussion, you can check there to see some discussion on this topic already:

Gonna continue the good fight a couple times per year, but I can appreciate your logic too. 

[(PSN)MYKK678]

47 minutes ago, Skaale said:

Gonna continue the good fight a couple times per year, but I can appreciate your logic too. 

It's not a "good fight" though, it's an idea formed without the requisite knowledge of how difficult it would be to implement.

Even without going into all of the technical mumbo jumbo, think about this. If it were easy, or even moderately challenging, do you really think that the long-sought-after Wolf Warframe wouldn't have been given the very first iteration of it? It didn't happen because it would either take an unrealistic amount of work, or from a technical standpoint just can't be done due to software restrictions. DE has packed a lot of things into this game already, but they all basically follow certain rules.

So they can make a really awfully restrictive version of what you're asking for, or you can realise that the excitement of having a frame like that would die off within 3 months and you may barely ever use it again. Also Quadrupedal animals can't hold guns or swords.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

10 hours ago, Skaale said:

We have got these skeletons at least. 

• Kubrow/kavat skeltons.
• Not sure if Tagfer is has his own, but it's definately something. 
• Bird 3
• There's a few other birds.
• What are those sand creatures on Mars? 
• Some of the bosses seem to have interesting skeletons. 
• I would mention Moas, but I really don't need a legs only frame lmao nvm I do
• Any other wacky shapes I'm forgetting? Oro worms? 

The point is that there's allot of crazy shapes to be had, and I want to see them happen. 

- a lot of people wanted Voruna to have a dedicated "all-fours" mode, we didn't really get that. 

- Tagfer has his own animations, but his skeleton is likely just a Kubrow/Kavat copy, since he has 4 legs.

- Birds are a thing in the game (Condrocs), but one of the biggest issues I see is the absence of hands.. not sure how they're gonna rig up weapons to such a frame lol. Bird Companions would be nice but Rebecca shot down that request in a Q&A. 

- those are Sand Skates, basically Stingray-like creatures that "swim" through the Martian sands and shoot quills form their tail, both at players and the Grineer. again, they could be viable as companions though (they'd look weird swimming through hard concrete/metal surfaces though.)

- Vay Hek stands out a lot, but for all I know all flying enemies might use the same rigging, and only their visuals and size are different.

- again, a lack of functioning hands is kind of an issue with regards to using weaponry. we already have them as companions too.

- I will concede that a Duviri style frame with an exalted Orowyrm form would be absolutely mental, in the best possible way, and not that much different in principle from existing abilities like Cloudwalker, it might actually be doable, but I think a more realistic proposition would be, once again, Orowyrm companions (or a Wyrmling skin for existing Sentinels, like, you know.. Wyrm/Wyrm Prime!)

bottom line is, it'd be a nightmare trying to get these skeletons to work, and I think DE have settled on Warframes always being Humanoid, but with some animalistic features/ animations added where possible. 

[Hexerin]

15 minutes ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

- a lot of people wanted Voruna to have a dedicated "all-fours" mode, we didn't really get that.

And it's still completely BS that we don't have that. She already goes on all fours while idle or attacking as it is, it would not take much work to extend that to movement as well.

[(XBOX)CaligulaTwily]

"Software limitations" we can control all kinds of things. A ball. Archwing. Railjack, and hijacked ships. Wyrms, Golden Maws. Dargyns. Kahl. Sevagoths Shadow. Necramechs. Probably something else I'm missing.

Ive seen videos of the devs playing with the Corpus Hijack Rover.

So it's not a "software limitation issue" rigging a PoV with button/control map. DE just doesn't wanna do it.

Either too much work/not enough money making a new skeleton or reusing an existing skeleton, or they simply don't like the idea as an Artistic Thing or something. 

Edited January 4 by (XBOX)CaligulaTwily

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

If it's a transformation Warframe that locks you to like an exalted weapon when you're transformed then that's likely to happen.

Good luck trying to convince them to make a default quadruped, for example, frame cause they're gonna have to animate stances, the way it uses weapons, running, bullet jumping, sliding, slide attacks, hacking, archwing, k-drive, railjack piloting, railjack forge, stealth kills, finishers, getting slammed by a lich, the way it would be animated in quests, emotes, petting, sitting in the helminth chair, throwing items like canisters or the bait in Deimos vaults, ground finishers... All of this work for a single frame

[(PSN)MYKK678]

19 minutes ago, (XBOX)CaligulaTwily said:

"Software limitations" we can control all kinds of things. A ball. Archwing. Railjack, and hijacked ships. Wyrms, Golden Maws. Dargyns. Kahl. Sevagoths Shadow. Necramechs. Probably something else I'm missing.

Ive seen videos of the devs playing with the Corpus Hijack Rover.

So it's not a "software limitation issue" rigging a PoV with button/control map. DE just doesn't wanna do it.

Either too much work/not enough money making a new skeleton or reusing an existing skeleton, or they simply don't like the idea as an Artistic Thing or something. 

Everything you've brought up is based on a previous iteration of something that was already built into the game except for Railjack. And as memory serves Railjack took an extensive amount of Background Updates in order to implement. Just an FYI, Background Updates = Money Spent. But let's cover your list regardless:

A Ball: One of the very first objects present in any kind of Physics Engine. 

Archwing: A preplanned system that resulted in a Warframe too

Railjack and Ships: Covered above

Wyrms/ Golden Maws/ Orowyrms: You literally played as one back in 2016 in the War Within. Already existed.

Dargyn: Uses the Archwing system with more restrictions.

Kahl: A person with 2 legs and 2 arms. Literally just the Tenno/Drifter system.

Sevagoths Shadow: Titania/Archwing system with restrictions to the Y axis.

Nechramechs: Another thing with 2 legs and 2 arms. Covered above.

 

[Alguien]

11 hours ago, Skaale said:

We have got these skeletons at least. 

• Kubrow/kavat skeltons.
• Not sure if Tagfer is has his own, but it's definately something. 
• Bird 3
• There's a few other birds.
• What are those sand creatures on Mars? 
• Some of the bosses seem to have interesting skeletons. 
• I would mention Moas, but I really don't need a legs only frame lmao nvm I do
• Any other wacky shapes I'm forgetting? Oro worms? 

The point is that there's allot of crazy shapes to be had, and I want to see them happen. 

And how many of those skeletons can hold the type of guns and melees a frame can use? You will need to make animations for those, then reload animations for the guns, for each type of gun and melee too. Then you also have the standing and idle animations, two types for each frame plus some special ones. and the abilities animations too since subsuming, did we mention archwings? using turrets both in railjack and the rampart? picking mission stuff like power cells? emotes too! every single one. anything else? Oh, cinematic animations too, a non-human frame isn't going to fall the same way when stabbed by War for example. Parazon animations too, probably liches animations too, lifting a non-human over the head gonna need a new animation. I mentioned subsuming, sitting on the Helmith would need a new type of animation for non-human frames too.
That's on top of my head, there is probably a lot more stuff you would need to animate in this new skeleton to work with all the stuff frames can do already. Sure you can call it "lazy" to reuse the same skeleton, but all DE needs to do is new idles, sliding, and abilities, because everything else is already backed on the skeleton.

Do I want to see non-human frames? Yes, but people need to be realistic and accept the only chance would be as an ability that transforms the frame, not as a general thing. And yes. I do think Voruna's 4 deserves to have animations for moving on all fours since it locks you from using weapons

[trst]

As pointed out, and repeatedly pointed out every time this topic comes up, it's too much animation/rigging work for far too little pay off.

Just think about every single animation shared by every single frame. Hacking, picking up/carrying items, jumping, bullet jumping, double jump, all aiming animations, all reload animations, every stance combo, K-Driving, all gestures, every cutscene animation, all ability animations used through Helminth, all interaction animations like RJ seats or trading, etc. Every one of those would need to be remade to work on a new skeleton if such a frame was always in a different stance.

Really the best bet at any frame close to something like that would be one like Sevagoth that transforms with one ability. But even then you'd also be more restricted as to what you can do and interact with while the ability was active. Plus it'd still be a lot more animation work than a typical frame. Ultimately it's not a case of limitations or laziness, just too much investment for too little payoff.

[(XBOX)EternalDrk Mako]

 some have stated rigging the skeletons into frames is the major issue and i must agree given de's evolution engine is derived from unreal  its not to hard to understand 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/skeleton-editor-in-unreal-engine/ (if your curious how unreal currently does this) 

DE: steve and reb have talked about it on off on devs for years, there was talk on quadruped frame (via fan concept) they liked but when it was implemented , lots of issues arose they couldn't' easily resolve. an ingame attempt was made imo with Voruna to go quadruped via kubro's rig IIRC? and you can see for yourself some of the problem's she stands up and walks after entering her supposed quad state via incomplete setup, thats about the best de could do so far, i know reb broached they are trying or looking at fixing it but no definitive fix soon(tm) 

Spoiler

 

IMO this was the same reasoning for the 4 armed frame hennya , de even did a live sculpt on prime time of her, but due to the complexity of doubling arms via her power , it was probably difficult and buggy to double skeleton rig of the arm motions and behaviors

although we have things like xaku which mirrors weapons that float around it already and and has dual forms its still 1 connected rig and no animations besides turn/fire occurs with weapon so its simplistic, unlike doubling melee animations 

Spoiler

 

[TARINunit9]

13 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

The issue isn't that they can't design or make a frame with a non-humanoid skeleton, but rather it would need to be rigged from scratch and it would work with none of the existing animations or stances. Enemies & specialized models (like bird 3 as an example) have a limited set of motions they do. They don't have to use any helminth ability, hold guns, use melee and melee stances, and/or equip the tons of cosmetics available.

So, it would be starting all over from scratch, and none of your cosmetics or weapons would work until they go through all 1000s of the items individually to check for clipping and position them accordingly, if that's even possible. The idea is cool, but the execution of it would be a massive overhaul for little other than "whoa, that's different".

Case in point for just how much work this would be:

Those amazing new techno-freak enemies that Arthur fights in '99? They have new animations befitting their bizarre and unique physiology, and they're cool and new and must have taken a lot of work... And those animations only happen during cutscenes. As soon as gameplay starts, they turn into Infested so they can reuse all of those animations instead

[(PSN)Unstar]

Someone brought up that we can already control a lot of non-Warframe things, but I think it's worth pointing out that the amount of functions these things have and the areas they can operate in is very limited.

For example, there are only a handful of locations in which we can control a Golden Maw, which has roughly 3 total animations.  Similarly, a Daragyn (the Grineer flying thing) doesn't have much in the way of animations and doesn't function well outside of an open sky.

But a Warframe needs to be playable everywhere.  It needs to have every parkour maneuver, it needs to be able to use every weapon, every Helminth ability, it needs to be able to use Railjacks and Archwings and K-drives and ride Kaithes.  It needs to be animated to function in every cutscene that involves a Warframe, it needs to be able to carry the (spoiler) in The Second Dream, it needs to hit and be hit by every Kuva Lich finisher, etc.  We are definitely talking about hundreds of animations at the very least.

With a humanoid Warframe, all of that work is already done and ready to go.  With a non-humanoid Warframe, you have to make all of that again from scratch.  And making that stuff costs time and money, time and money that would otherwise be able to develop other game content.  Broadly speaking, the juice just isn't going to be worth the squeeze.

[Packetdancer]

5 hours ago, (XBOX)EternalDrk Mako said:

 some have stated rigging the skeletons into frames is the major issue and i must agree given de's evolution engine is derived from unreal  its not to hard to understand

This is not merely an Unreal thing, I should note. Now, bear in mind I'm going to wildly oversimplify here because you don't want to read an entire essay on skeletal animation (or at least, I don't want to write an entire essay on it), and I'm thus leaving out a lot of things like the concept of morph targets and suchnot.

But still, at the core, the limitation of "to playback animations built on one rig, you need a target rig that is at the very least very similar" is basically true of almost every skeletal animation system I've ever encountered.

The vast majority of animation systems literally are just an array of "at this point in the timeline, these are the transforms of the bones on this rig." (There are exceptions for purely-procedural and IK/physics-driven animation, but in those cases you often don't actually have "animations" in the normal sense anyway. And also, as mentioned: not going to write an entire essay.)

This means those animations only work if those bones are there to be assigned the appropriate transforms; "left calf is rotated this way" only has meaning if there is a left calf, after all.

Often, one rig will be shared among multiple meshes, meaning you can use the same animations on different characters. An example of this is the two Unreal Engine 5 default characters, "Manny" (the male test character) and "Quinn" (the female test character). The two are different meshes, but they have the same rig, meaning the "the transform of this bone is this value at this time in the timeline" animation data works for both, as the "this bone" will exist in both cases. However, even with a shared rig, animations don't always work quite right -- the default animation set for basic dev in Unreal has MM_<whatever> (where "MM" means "Mannequin, Male") and MF_<whatever> ("Mannequin, Female") animations for some things that don't look right if you use Manny's animations on Quinn directly. But other animations that work fine on both, there's one version shared between everything.

This is what Warframe does, so far as I know -- all the frames (and the Drifter) presumably share a rig, meaning animations like riding a kaithe, melee attacks, emotes, and so on can be shared between them; you don't need to re-animate "this is how you ride a kaithe" or "this is how you wall-latch" or "this is how you play the 'wave' emote" or whatever for every single frame individually. For places where a frame does need to do something differently -- certain frames have custom dashes, after all -- you do need a new animation... but you can do just that animation for the new frame, rather than every single animation in the game.

Now, you can retarget animations from one rig to another -- heck, these days you can even do it at runtime -- but the rigs still have to share certain things in common.

For instance, the Unreal Engine 4 default "Mannequin" character has what was long called the "standard Epic skeleton"; pelvis as the core of the animations, a couple of "spine" bones off of that, neck, clavicle, etc. The newer Manny and Quinn have a different and more complex skeletal rig; they have more bones to the spine, some additional rotation-specific bones to make limbs move more naturally, etc. Still, you can define "these three spine bones map to these three of the 5 spine bones in the other rig" and so on, and use that to retarget animations (mostly) automatically. There's often a lot of little cleanup to do, especially for fiddly things like hand position and whatnot, but it will still do a lot of the work for you.

But the key here is that conceptually the rigs are still very similar. Yes, they may have different names for certain bones -- or one may have bones the other lacks -- but both have one pelvis, a spine of some form, two legs, two arms, five fingers on the hands, etc.

Now, you could potentially retarget portions of an animation -- if you had a centaur frame, you could at least retarget everything above "pelvis" onto the humanoid portion and it would probably be at least marginally useful -- but even with that shortcut, you still have to go through and hand-animate the lower half for everything. And if we're talking about making frames that are purely quadrupedal, you don't even have that partial shortcut; absolutely everything has to be re-animated from scratch, as Unstar points out.

Edited January 4 by Packetdancer

[Skaale]

10 hours ago, (XBOX)CaligulaTwily said:

"Software limitations" we can control all kinds of things. A ball. Archwing. Railjack, and hijacked ships. Wyrms, Golden Maws. Dargyns. Kahl. Sevagoths Shadow. Necramechs. Probably something else I'm missing.

Ive seen videos of the devs playing with the Corpus Hijack Rover.

So it's not a "software limitation issue" rigging a PoV with button/control map. DE just doesn't wanna do it.

Either too much work/not enough money making a new skeleton or reusing an existing skeleton, or they simply don't like the idea as an Artistic Thing or something. 

You don't need to tell me lmao, I've been saying it for years

[Corvid]

I'd say that if we were to get a non-humanoid recurring playable class, it would be more likely to be put in the Necramech slot than anything else. Mostly because that removes a lot of the prerequisite functions that would be needed for a frame (all it would really need would be a mounting point for an arch gun and the ability to compact itself for the new tileset's summon animation).