My One Complaint About DJ Sona

Adam the Bear·2/5/2015, 4:15:08 PM·67 votes·5,736 views

I absolutely love the DJ Sona skin, but there is one small thing that bothers me. The animated equalizers are off-tempo static animations.

I not a programmer, audio engineer, nor animator, so I have no idea what goes into creating/animating an equalizer, but the equalizeresqe animation used to designate Kinetic form's powercord specifically bothers me. While I think it would be cool if it showed the actual equalizer values, whatever those designate, I don't know how practical that would be to animate. I do however feel it wouldn't be out of the question to at least have it's animations pulsate in time with the music.

Maybe it's just me, but I find the out-of-sync beats of the animation and actual music visually deteriorating. I really do love the skin, and this issue is nowhere near problematic enough to stop me from buying it, but the change seems simple enough to my uninformed mind.

26 Comments

Ayame Isaki2/5/2015, 4:20:16 PM8 votes

Now that you have pointed this out, this is glaringly obvious. Without seeing how any of this implemented, I am going to go out a limb and say it is probably not a trivial change.

Aku no Momiji2/5/2015, 9:58:15 PM4 votes

(Frequency) Spectrum Analyzer :D

Without going into "Momiji, please shut up" tier detail (I could qualify as programmer and engineer and definitely nerdy enough to love talking about it :D), getting it accurate (even if only for the players currently subscribed to her music) would be /all not worth. Getting it to pulse in rhythm would be more doable (as I understand they introduced some technology with Vel'Koz that lets them move parts of models independently of the regular framed animations... I'm really hoping to see this on Cass soon :D).

But as a programmer, I can confidently say that not knowing how the LoL (video, sound, and networking) engines work, I can't provide an answer.

However the two most important points I wanted to touch on are A) Ctrl Alt Tibbers is an awesome name and B) Why are you watching the Spec Analyzer? You should be watching this. Or, you know, the teamfight/laning that's going on... but mostly this

Circuit Bear2/5/2015, 5:56:30 PM4 votes

I noticed that fairly quickly. And while I agree with you, I can only make a few guesses based on general coding knowledge.

I can't say why exactly they didn't do it without seeing their code, but based on what I did notice, I believe the equalizer is basically on a loop of just max to min. At least her mask did when I was looking at it.

If I had to give a reason, it is probably because the sound system is separated from the animations for the most part, so syncing them would require much more code then a loop and have much more fail points. Secondly, due to the model size, it probably was considered a small improvement vs the work requirement. And if you were to say the equalizer on some of her parts were to match, all of them would need to,which I believe the ultimate also has to be taken into account. I have no idea how equalizers work but that would seem to me to require premeditation of where the song was and how far ahead to prep the visual image to match due to Sona's ult's minor delay.

Another thing to consider, you would need to have a programmer either work with a musician for an extended period to get it right, or have a programmer who has a background familiar with equalizers.

I'm more of a server side but just some things I would have thought of.

FarRockBF2/5/2015, 4:50:04 PM2 votes

This would be a big change; requiring the audio to interact with the visual something that has no technical connection right now.

It's sad but it's not going to happen.

Lunar Lightning2/6/2015, 10:20:54 PM2 votes

agree

Ashes Arise2/5/2015, 6:45:56 PM2 votes

What animated equalizers?

Siachi2/5/2015, 4:51:27 PM2 votes

Eh; I'm not very musically literate, so even knowing it doesn't match up probably won't affect me.

But yeah, although it would probably be a good amount of work for them to do, I could see this little detail making the skin just that more complete. And they're giving the skin an extra patch of testing on the PBE, so you never know.

Myrddin2/6/2015, 9:34:41 AM1 votes

As someone that has used the skin on the pbe, the thing i dislike about the skin is the voice.

I simply won't buy it because of it

A Tall Joke2/6/2015, 5:03:29 PM1 votes

My best guess:

The movement of the rigs is based completely on the speed of the movements getting done (which is why homeguards makes some ridiculous looking runs). So to match it to the music, you'd have to program a separate rig that moves in complete sync with the champion rig and then has its own independent movement programmed in for this singular rig.

Programming the equalizer itself should be pretty easy (we've had that stuff for a while now lol) as far as I can tell. I imagine you can decompose the audio as you're processing it to play. Or preprocess some of the audio and run a fourier transformation and then animate multiple bars to move with frequency based on the resultant waves. But then you'd have to program the rig which is definitely nontrivial (I might be biased here; graphics programming scares me :P) It's one thing to have a static single screen do this; it's another to have a model which interacts with other models in a pseudo-3d field do this.

Of course, I'm not an expert and 0 knowledge of how LoL works but... My best guess

Bemapon2/5/2015, 11:47:49 PM1 votes

Its just in the PBE. I feel like they intend it to sync up and will fix this before release...?

TheSlappySlap2/5/2015, 11:26:42 PM1 votes

It shouldn't be very difficult to implement. That being said, it's a waste of computational resources imo.

redniwediS2/5/2015, 5:02:32 PM1 votes

I'll be able to live with it, as I'll be paying attention to other things most of the time, but it will draw a small sigh from me on the rare occasions where I notice it again.

Starfireisaqtpie2/6/2015, 5:21:12 AM1 votes

Probably off-topic, but another issue is the fact that you can't understand her when she speaks. It's like ok a game where talking birds ( Anivia ) and polar bears () are a thing, why don't we just get spiced up dialogue when we use DJ Sona? I know dialogue isn't the #1 priority of the Riot team, but the moment they gave Anivia and Volibear voices was the moment they decided that it's the #1 possibility to add to a character.