Weapon redraw issues and solution

Sort of. The old animations included a "redraw" delay regardless of whether you were in the correct combat stance or not. To use Arcanaville's terminology weapon sets required you to always play an "initial" sequence regardless of combat mode and if you were in the correct mode already you got a "readying weapon" animation instead of a "drawing weapon" animation. The change removed this requirement effectively shortening animation times for weapon sets except when switching modes.

I briefly looked at it before to see if we could just get away with nixing weapon draw animations (outside of only playing them when out of range or without a target). But, even putting aside the aesthetics of a physical weapon just instantly appearing in your hand, it simply did not work at all. It insisted on playing the weapon draw animation no matter what I tried to get it to do. The things that let the system know you're in a certain weapon mode, which in turn triggers the appropriate run, jump, etc. animations to play and the weapon to appear to be held in your hand rather than glued to your open palm and periodically jammed into your noggin, are also the things that cause the weapon draw animation to play in order to get you into that mode if you're not already in it.

That's just how the system works, because that's how they decided it needed to work...and all of the sequencer moves are set up to work that way. Even if I could figure out a way to get around the mode/stance issues I'd have to re-configure all of the sequencer moves related to weapon modes. It's theoretically possible, but it's enough work that it's not something I can just do without time being scheduled to do it.

Yup.

No idea why, but yes. Animations that alternate like that are set up as two moves in the sequencers. Those moves point to different animations and are given the same statebits, interrupts, and priorities that trigger them to play. When the system goes looking for which animation to play, it looks for the any and every move that match the statebits currently in the stack, throws away any that aren't set up to interrupt the move currently playing, and then plays the move that has the highest priority. If everything is equal, it alternates...and you get left punch/right punch/left punch/etc.

For those interested, a good analogy for how our sequencers and statebits work would be the tags you see at the bottom of threads. Imagine if you couldn't direct people to a thread by just giving them the name of a thread or even a URL, but instead could only give them a list of all of the tags defined for that thread. It would then be up to them to search through all of the threads, look for the ones that matched the list of tags you gave them, and hope that it's the right place to be looking.

Then further imagine that there are restrictions on which thread you can go to. IE, you can't navigate to any thread in Developers' Corner if you're currently reading a thread in City Life - CoH & CoV General Discussions

Then further imagine that there were a few hundred sections of the forums, each one with multiple restrictions on where you could go defined in abstract ways like "If you're in Suggestions and Ideas then you can go to any section that is about Archetypes or Builds" or specific ways such as "If you're trying to go to a thread in Archetypes & Powers then you can only get there from Player vs. Player, For Fun!, or any server except Triumph", or very specific ways such as "australian players? can only be opened if you are currently looking at Message Board Rules and Guidelines!"

Then further imagine that for the first couple of years, there were only 100 pre-defined tags that everyone could use for every threads at that time.

Then further imagine that threads created with the icon would take priority over those created with the icon.

Then imagine it's up to the computer to figure all that junk out rather than a critical thinking person who can reason out that when looking for a thread about Kheldian builds, it's probably not the thread over in the for fun section talking about the Twilight movies...so it's entirely up to you to define all the crazy rules, tags, and pick the right icons for every single thread.

That's a pretty good analogy.

Thinking outside the box... couldn't you (aesthetics aside) replace the weapon draw animations with a single frame that's merely the final state? That would presumably reduce (re)draw time to two 1/8 sec "Arcanatime" ticks at worst, possibly less. This would visually be nearly identical to "instant weapon", but not require rearranging the way sequencers work.

Personally, I don't want it; the fluidity of the Archery set on my agile blaster, and the "shing!" of pulling out the broadsword on my scrapper, are important parts of the look and feel of the game I would not give up for a barely-detectable increase in damage output, or even a noticeable one. If we could make wishes, I'd like for a few of the most common cases (such as Air Superiority with a melee weapon out) to get their own "hilt smash" animation, as much for the looks of it as anything (so we don't have swords suddenly disappearing either); but I'm aware of the level of work involved.

Actually, although BaB did some trimming here, the real problem was cast time. When you use a power like, say, Slash, there are two possibilities:

1. The weapon is not yet drawn, so the act of using the power plays the weapon draw animation and then the Slash attack animation

2. The weapon is already drawn, so the act of using the power plays the Slash attack animation only.

Lets say that Slash's animation takes 1.33 seconds, and the weapon draw takes 0.33 seconds (I'm actually just making up numbers here, I don't actually know these numbers off the top of my head and its not worth looking up). In that case, because the weapon draw and the weapon attack animation are both "Rooted" (meaning you can't act during them) if you already have the weapon drawn Slash takes 1.33 seconds, and if you don't Slash takes 1.66 seconds.

In the old days, Slash's cast time would have been set to 1.66 seconds, which is as long as the worst case scenario. And what if your weapon was already drawn? Well, then Slash would play for 1.33 seconds, and probably play some sort of filler animation for 0.33 seconds while you were locked out of doing anything else, until the cast time expired**. What the devs did between BaB and Castle was tightened up the animations a bit, and then set the cast times to be the *best case* scenario rather than the worst case scenario.

Now, if your weapon isn't drawn you are forced to play a 0.33 draw animation, then a 1.33 attack animation, and in effect the attack takes 1.66 seconds. But if your weapon is already drawn, you are only forced to play the attack animation which is 1.33 seconds, and then because the cast time is also 1.33 seconds (not 1.66 seconds) you are free to act.

This is actually interesting, because in the old days there was no weapon draw penalty. Whether you drew your weapons or not, you were just as fast - or just as slow. The cast times were covering the weapon draw. Ironically, by trying to help out the players by removing the pervasive weapon draw buffer Castle and BaB exposed the weapon draw penalty, so that there now *is* a penalty.

Which the players immediately turned around and started pleading to have removed. Because no good deed goes unpunished. My prediction: if the devs ever figure out a way to remove the penalty associated with weapon draw but keep weapon draw itself in the game the players will start to ask the devs why it takes just as long to use an attack when you don't have to draw the weapons as it does when you do, and BaB will do a face palm so hard that gives him a concussion.



** Attacks then and now sometimes have non-rooted and interruptible animations that play after the core attack animation. Its what happens if you attack someone with a particular power and then immediately take your hands off the keyboard. Its what you do if you are done with the attack animation but haven't been told to do anything else yet. The extreme case of this is jump kick, which has a complete animation which you can see if you execute jump kick and do nothing else, but only the first half is rooted and uninterruptible so if you queue an attack it will interrupt the jump kick animation in the middle and begin playing the new attack. Its how the devs created a compromise between having a nice full somersault kick and not having jump kick take so long to execute it was not worth taking as an attack.

Note: "ArcanaTime" is only relevant when it comes to the game servers queuing player commands and actions. The animation sequencers operate under a 30 tick per second clock synchronized (presumably) with the game client, have no tailgating, and appear to be immune to aliasing issues. In other words, they are immune to ArcanaTime or any other similar analogous problem. If BaB designs a set of animations to play one after the other, they will play one after the other frame by frame without delay.

I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere. I'm just pleased to see that the Oceanic Lounge is the go-to forum for obscure examples.

Alternate way to look at it, you had the penalty on every attack

(Offtopic) Anyway, the funny part of the whole thing is just as we seemed to be able to convince most who asked that there was no redraw penalty added to an attack if your weapon wasn't out, they changed it so there is

While the assertion has some merit, I don't believe it holds true. The reason people, or myself, at least, requested an extraction of weapon draw from out of weapon powers was because powers just took too long. Some powers may have had filler animations, but many did not, causing weapon powersets to have absolutely no flow to them whatsoever, even with the weapon drawn. Because weapon draw time was appended at the end of each attack, weapon sets would sing, wait, swing, wait. This was especially terrible in Broadsword's Disembowel, which gave you a full second of doing NOTHING while empty frames played out. By excising draw from our of weapon animations, it allowed weapon sets to flow from one attack into the next, becoming faster but, in effect, LOOKING much faster than they had actually become.

Basically, no-one likes to fight by firing one attack, then waiting around before he could fire another. People complained about the low levels where lack of attacks causes this, but at least for non-weapon sets, more attacks and more recharge fixed it. For weapon sets, nothing could fix it because the gaps were written into the powers, themselves. Removing those removed the problem. Removing or streamlining draw now can't cause the same level of dissatisfaction, because the root cause for dissatisfaction - non-flowing attacks - is not coming back. Dissatisfaction at any change, no matter what it is, is to be expected, but a good change would only incite a few grumbles, and I don't foresee such a change inciting much more than that. Nothing, really, much more than a few people complaining about how it was the wrong thing to mess with entirely.

In the long run, though people still complain about weapon draw as a penalty today, I'm fairly confident that no-one would want to go back to the days of no weapon penalty. About the only remaining complaint is what the original complaint was all about back then - interrupting the flow of attacks. Whether it is or inst a tangible slowdown, stopping to draw a weapon too often just looks bad. I dare say a lot of people would rather lose draw and keep the delay than lose the delay but keep the draw.

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.

We, as players, are always whining and griping about features we want, changes we didn't like and new features we get that weren't exactly the way we like it. So one powerset got new animations and another didn't, so what? A slow-release would placate some of the userbase while the rest would rage, but are the devs hurt by all this?

You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Removing unnecessary redraws from one set is better than none at all. And moving them one at a time is better than never trying at all.

Based on my experiences in Star Wars Galaxies, where their strategy was to handle revamps on a Class by Class basis, then yes, I can definitely say the game's bottom line can be hurt by that kind of strategy. It divides the playerbase into armed camps, and leads to wild swings in balance and popularity as previously bad classes become too good to be true. Then the moment a revamp goes bad, and the devs revisit that wounded class instead of continuing with the planned schedule, there's serious allegations of favoritism.

Now just dealing with issues of redraw may not seem like anything near the same scale, and I know that. However anything that makes it seem like the dev's "love" is focused (unfairly or not) just leads to division (and eventually quitting). It's a climate this game has largely managed to avoid, and I would prefer to err on the side of caution and keep it that way.

Thanks, Arcanaville. I knew there had been some change to weapon redraw that seemed to speed things up, but was really fuzzy on the details.

Precedent already exists for this, in fact. Back in the day, Claws was the first set to be tweaked and have draw times removed back when it was originally reworked. I think, so at least. War Mace came next, when it was shown to underperform, which caused BABs to look into it and discover unreasonably long rooted times. Finally, Dual Blades came out and that was constructed with draw times separate from attack times. When War Mace and Battle Axe were ported over to Brutes, they had their weapon draw times moved out of attack times, an Broadsword benefited from these changes as it shared 8 of its 9 animations with them. Katana, however, did not benefit. An Issue later, Katana had its draw times moved out of its attacks, in turn.

All that is to say that we got rid of built-in draw step by step. There was no one single patch that took draw out of all powersets, so what is being dismissed here actually already happened. And for what it's worth, I've no problem with it happening again. As was mentioned, some powersets tweaked is better than no powersets tweaked, and as long as the promise of doing them all eventually exists, no-one has grounds to complain, only grumble.

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.

I'm not sure that sequence is quite correct. I think you might be conflating three separate things that were going on at the time: animation speed ups and adjustments, cast time/root time realignment, and cast time buffer reductions (this one is what most people associate with "removing weapon draw penalty").

Basically, at around the same time BaB was speeding up some attacks that were slower than desirable, and working to correct powers whose cast time was much longer than their rooted time (or vice versa), *and* working on the issue of weapon redraw buffering. Only one of those actually affected the weapon redraw "penalty" and I think it occured very quickly, from dual blades as the first real experiment to everything else soon after. Although I can't say with certainty that Claws wasn't fiddled with before that (in terms of weapon redraw - Claws was fiddled with in many ways some of which might have affected weapon redraw buffering coincidentally: the hyperfast pylon edition on test, for example, I believe had no cast time buffers).

More specificity here would help. Which power exactly are you using that allows you to slide around?

Sounds like you are getting the issue where when you use a power sometimes it does't get the rooting due to timing(?) issues.

To add to that; I've had a couple reports of this over the last few months, and QA has not been able to replicate it internally. So, more info is definitely needed to get this addressed.

fparn!

There is a 'sup dawg' in this.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to retract yesterday's statement. I've run into a roadblock with Shields that's going to prevent this method from working.

At this point I'm going to have to explore a code solution to the problem, but I can't say when or if that will happen.

Looks like Positron was playing with his mind-control ray around the office again. I wonder if we're getting an underwater zone next.