OLD video female stance

Anyone remember that old video (WARNING: 20MB download!) of City of Heroes that came out, what? 2000? 2001? The one with all the cool tricks that never made it into the game, like body part targeting, that little flip when you jump, flying above the clouds and so forth. It actually makes a the game look and feel a LOT cooler than it was back at Launch.

Something specifically interesting I noticed, though, and that's been reflected in the "Look! Butt!" pic that was being passed around, is that females had a whole set of stances and movement and combat animations that were completely distinct from those of males. The most striking seems to be their idle pose, as caught in a pic of a VERY outdated character creator. Notice how the males all have the the same stance they do today with legs wide apart, fists balled up and chest puffed up like macho man? Well, the women do not. Instead, they stand with feet close together and arms to the sides, almost reminiscent of Ghost Widow when she uses her Soul Storm.

Now, I've been over the debate of how "girly" or not this looks, but I'd be lying if I said that this wasn't very strikingly different from how our women hold themselves, and I must admit I would probably like it. I wonder what happened to those animations. They obviously had an almost full set from what I've seen, including running, standing and even hovering. So why scrap them? The once they replaced them with are just clones of the male animations, anyway.

I wonder if we'll ever get those "stance" emotes BABs was talking about back in the day, where we wouldn't necessarily change our actual animations, but could assume them when standing around for whatever reason. If ever we did, this would be one I would ask for.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

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flying above the clouds and so forth.

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Y'know, it would be nice to do that... they could at least move the ceiling above all of the buildings...

Edit: Sorry for the threadjack

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I wonder what happened to those animations. They obviously had an almost full set from what I've seen, including running, standing and even hovering. So why scrap them? The once they replaced them with are just clones of the male animations, anyway.

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In all fairness, Sam, they likely didn't have a full set. Remember that at that point, the game was still in bits and pieces. Most of the powersets listed didn't yet exist, and in fact, if I remember correctly, I think the only powers that did exist were the ones that were shown being used in the video. Y'know, "Claws" literally consisted of that one attack that was shown, same with "Fire Blast".

Now, as for why they scrapped the intended female pose? Who knows. When you start to look back through the earliest pictures and videos, you'll notice a lot of things that were radically changed by the time the game finally went live. Heck, the entire layout of Atlas Park changed (not to mention that Atlas' globe went from being hollow metal to solid stone).

Looks like the female Elementalist idle stance in Guild Wars.

It would fit some of my female characters very nicely, but would really look weird on others. (I have a female character in full-body powerarmor whose gender is purposefully supposed to be difficult to discern, for example.) I think I prefer the current, more neutral animations.

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I wonder if we'll ever get those "stance" emotes BABs was talking about back in the day, where we wouldn't necessarily change our actual animations, but could assume them when standing around for whatever reason. If ever we did, this would be one I would ask for.

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Forgot about this part.

Actually, there are a few poses you can strike while standing around. They've been in-game for a long time, too. Unfortunately, they're just the individual poses that normally loop as part of our characters' regular "standing around" actions.:

/e akimbo: hands on hips, feet shoulder-distance apart

/e crossarms: take a wild guess.

And once you're in them, your pose does not change until you move, use another emote, or use a power.

On an interesting little sidenote, one night last week in the Training Room, BABs was chatting with us and decided to let us see the new costume change emotes a little bit early. Before he left, he tried typing in something like "heroicpose1" (probably not right; my memory's a bit dodgy at times). On what I assume is a second attempt, his character crossed his arms like normal, but his legs at least appeared to be close together instead of shoulder-distance apart like when you use the "crossarms" emote. Take this as you will. May be something for PCs in the future, may be a dev-only NPC command.

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In all fairness, Sam, they likely didn't have a full set. Remember that at that point, the game was still in bits and pieces. Most of the powersets listed didn't yet exist, and in fact, if I remember correctly, I think the only powers that did exist were the ones that were shown being used in the video. Y'know, "Claws" literally consisted of that one attack that was shown, same with "Fire Blast".

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What I meant to say by "a full set" was they had an idle stance as obvious from that video, a flight stance as obvious from the "Look! Butt!" picture Miss Kitty was fond of spreading around, they had at least one female-specific Blast animation (a really ugly girly sort, too) that was seen from another old pic, and they had a unique running animation which we actually kept, the juggling butt run females do today.

Power animations I can see being consistent, as that pretty much doubles the workload (though I'd still prefer to have distinct animations between males and females, but oh well) as BABs has commented several times, and I don't even mind them having the same combat stance, as all combat animations key off that and return to that. But why have the same manly idle stance? I mean, I have a couple of big strong women that this sort of works for, but it's obviously designed for a burly super hero to show off his manly muscles and it looks out of place on most women.

Not that the one in the picture is so great, but it is DIFFERENT, and in a very distinct way. I've often fallen victim to wondering if what I'm looking at is a man or a woman in-game, because many people tend to wear clothes that distort the model's proportions, so unless I can spin around and note the presence of breasts (or lack thereof) it's easy enough to mistake a woman for a skinny man in many situations. Having them pose differently would go a long way towards making them a little bit more distinct.

Like I said, it's too late to hope for that now, but I was still kind of hoping we'd get something like that stance as an emote. BABs said we'd be able to emote with weapons in Issue 15 (or so I remember), which would make idle stance emotes EVEN BETTER. It's pretty trivial to bind a stance emote to a button and press it every time you plan to stand around for more than 2 seconds. I have my flight positions bound that way.

I'm kind of wishing for more luxury items over more content these days

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Pretty cool video; I had never seen that before today. Interesting that they'd thought about doing Shapeshifting as a power at one time.

Also I saw some unfamiliar villainous factions listed:

Seraphim
Twilight Men
Fear Factor
Revalation
The Killing Crew

Pretty neat!

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they had a unique running animation which we actually kept, the juggling butt run females do today.


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Thankfully so! Didn't we also lose some female sitting emotes due to possible cartoon undergarment exposure?

I find myself looking forward to a new emote more than a new task force, not as a knock on any Issue, but because they are something that I can do anytime that I'm ingame.

~MM

Fear Factor would be a pretty lame name these days after the show. The others sound cool though.

~MM

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Pretty cool video; I had never seen that before today. Interesting that they'd thought about doing Shapeshifting as a power at one time.

Also I saw some unfamiliar villainous factions listed:

Seraphim
Twilight Men
Fear Factor
Revalation
The Killing Crew

Pretty neat!

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Hm..... intersting villain groups, might be a good thing to try to make in the MA...

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Pretty cool video; I had never seen that before today. Interesting that they'd thought about doing Shapeshifting as a power at one time.

Also I saw some unfamiliar villainous factions listed:

Seraphim
Twilight Men
Fear Factor
Revalation
The Killing Crew

Pretty neat!

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Hm..... intersting villain groups, might be a good thing to try to make in the MA...

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I think there was a somewhat recent explanation (year or so ago) of what some of these villain groups evolved into. I think the Twilight Men became the Malta and Fear Factor became the Carnival, though I might be misremembering them. I forget if any of the others were mentioned.

I love that standing pose. I'd probably use something like that if possible.

I was also lamenting earlier about how we don't have any forward leaning emotes. I was taking some screenshots and thought it'd be neat if we had something where we could lean forward and cross arms on something like the railing in Ouroboros. I can imagine that it'd usually not line up with geometry though.

Still, I'd love some running, walking, standing around poses. I heard someone mention that CO lets you define what animations you go through when moving. Like, you can set up your character to walk normally, lumber like a beast (like our huges sort of do), or run on all fours like an animal. If these didn't carry over to power animations and were just used when moving, it probably wouldn't be TOO much work to add. Maybe BABs should look into it!

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

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If I Remember correctly awhile back Arcanaville had posted some research on how the female models were made inferior to the male ones because of discrepancies in combat stance and attack animations.

I suspect this is related to that and would explain why it's no longer used in game.

forget the female stance (yeah, i admit, it's cool) I still want the flip when I jump and start flying... I've been imagining that everything I jump in the air and hit fly.

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If I Remember correctly awhile back Arcanaville had posted some research on how the female models were made inferior to the male ones because of discrepancies in combat stance and attack animations.

I suspect this is related to that and would explain why it's no longer used in game.

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Actually, Arcanaville did that analysis after release when the discussed changes had already been eliminated. What Arcanaville brought up was minute differences in animation times due to different skeletal compositions, minute being on the order of a single clock interval. As she found it, the basic male skeleton was the only one that had truly accurate animation times listed. The huge and female models, thanks to differences in structure, size and speed, actually attacked very slightly slower even though they used the same animations.

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If I Remember correctly awhile back Arcanaville had posted some research on how the female models were made inferior to the male ones because of discrepancies in combat stance and attack animations.

I suspect this is related to that and would explain why it's no longer used in game.

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Actually, Arcanaville did that analysis after release when the discussed changes had already been eliminated. What Arcanaville brought up was minute differences in animation times due to different skeletal compositions, minute being on the order of a single clock interval. As she found it, the basic male skeleton was the only one that had truly accurate animation times listed. The huge and female models, thanks to differences in structure, size and speed, actually attacked very slightly slower even though they used the same animations.

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Correction and clarification:

All entities in the game have a model type: in the case of player characters there are three: the Player-Male, Player-Female, and Player-Huge models (male, female, and huge for short). Whenever an entity has to do something that plays an animation, the game engine first checks to see if there is an animation specifically written for that model type. If there isn't, the game then plays the Male one.

Most player actions just have a Male animation, which all models use by default. However, when the animator actually *wants* the Female or Huge models to play a different animation (lets say, the Female running animation) then the animator makes one for that specific model to override the Male default one.

Some attacks actually have specific animations for Female models relative to Male ones (ditto: Huge). When that happens, sometimes the two aren't identical. Often in the past the Female one was longer, and therefore slower. Sometimes this was by just a frame or two, but in rare cases the disparity was significant: as much as a 7 or 8 frames (a quarter of a second). When that happened, Females using that attack basically attacked slower than Males. In only one case did I find a Female animation that was faster than the Male one.

(I don't think this was a deliberate act of sexist nerfing: rather I think that its simply the case that the animators tend to make the Male animations first, and then if they think the Female animation should be different they go back later and make a different Female one. When they do, they are often adding what they believe to be "female characteristics" to the motion, which tends to add frames rather than subtract them. The same problem tended to happen to Huge animations as well, albeit less often.)

I notified BaB of the discrepancies where I found them, and he did a pretty good job of redoing them to make them either identical or within a frame or so of each other. Due to the mechanics of "ArcanaTime" the difference of a frame or two is unlikely to have any impact on the overall rate of fire for players. All of this was during the I10-I12 time frame and has nothing to do specifically with changes in animations from beta to release.


By the way, at the same time I noted (half-jokingly, really) the fact that females are sometimes slower than males, I also noted that sometimes left-handed punches are slower than right-handed ones, and sometimes attacks take longer when flying. Left-handed flying women were definitely at a distinct disadvantage. Most of those have been cleaned up as well, although there are a few that linger here and there.

Good point. Forward-leaning emotes sound like a very good idea. Side-leaning emotes are something we miss, too. Ever wanted to have your character lean on one hand on a street light? I don't work. The closest I've come has been the /em stop emote, because it puts the right hand up and if you rotate it just right, it looks like you're leaning... Almost.

One of the things I'd really like to see are idle standing animations. I would VERY MUCH like to see them, as they would give us a LOT more character for (comparatively) little work. A lot less than re-writing the animations engine to allow us to pick our running styles, anyway.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

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Due to the mechanics of "ArcanaTime" the difference of a frame or two is unlikely to have any impact on the overall rate of fire for players.

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HAAAAha. Now you're using it.

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Seraphim
Twilight Men
Fear Factor
Revalation
The Killing Crew


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I think some of those groups simply got renamed. Twilight Men may very well have become Malta, since Malta is not mentioned in the video.

The flip-to-fly animation is cool, but I'd be more than giddy to just have that female idle pose.

good luck D.B.B.

*wants female at-rest stance now*

I like the one we have now, but just sayin' it would be a nice one to see cycled through, too.

*wonders if these emotes are still somewhere in the democode*

Hmmmmm...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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Anyone remember that old video (WARNING: 20MB download!) of City of Heroes that came out, what? 2000? 2001? The one with all the cool tricks that never made it into the game, like body part targeting, that little flip when you jump, flying above the clouds and so forth.

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Yes, yes I do.

See my Guides and Tutorials

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they had a unique running animation which we actually kept, the juggling butt run females do today.


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Thankfully so! Didn't we also lose some female sitting emotes due to possible cartoon undergarment exposure?

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Altered (skirts finally dipped in front,) as well, frankly, as gained leg-crossed emotes when we got to sit on benches, chairs, etc.

See my Guides and Tutorials

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Anyone remember that old video (WARNING: 20MB download!) of City of Heroes that came out, what? 2000? 2001? The one with all the cool tricks that never made it into the game, like body part targeting, that little flip when you jump, flying above the clouds and so forth.

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Yes, yes I do.

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I keep forgetting you have a bunch of cool guides like that I had a quick look over your guide, though, and I didn't see a mention of the female idle stance. Is it there and I'm just missing it?

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.