Animations as a Detriment to Powers

I think the main problem is aesthetic. I am sure they can allow the weapons to remain drawn for all the weapon powersets when performing a non-wpn powerset animation (Boxing, Dull Pain, etc.). However, there may be quite a few powers where this looks less than stellar and/or causes one to impale oneself. I would be fine with having the weapon just appear in the hand, instead of having the draw animation, but this must be a decision the devs are against for aesthetic reasons.

Okay, first of all, whether or not you can have a gun or swords in your hand when you perform an animation isn't the problem, AFAIK. It's how the gun or swords GET there. All animations in this game have a "stance", and this stance determines how and what you are holding in your hands when you perform the animation. Most animations have the bare handed stance, while the Dual Pistols animations have the Dual Wield stance.

What this means, basically, is that you could do an MA roundhouse kick with a Katana out. But everyone else playing the game would also do that roundhouse kick with the Katana out. Including Martial Arts Scrappers who don't even have a Katana. While it is certainly POSSIBLE, the way the stance is "baked in" to the animation means that it must be baked in for EVERYONE using that animation.

Plus, it wouldn't just put the Katana in your hand, it would make you draw the Katana. You would have to go into the Left Hand Wield (actually a substance of Dual Wield) stance before doing the roundhouse kick. This would eliminate the redraw problem for people wielding a Katana, but add one for players who are using Dual Pistols, or nothing at all. So instead of removing the redraw problem, you are just passing it on to someone else to deal with.

What is needed is for an animation to be able to play in a selection of stances. If it's a kick, for instance, let it play whether you have a Katana or Dual Pistols in your hand or not. But since this is "baked in" code, we are probably talking about rewriting the game engine. BaB tried to work around it, but apparently couldn't because of Shields, and its stance. Alternately, he may have tried to make the weapon "teleport" into your hand, but couldn't stop at least some time being taken for the redraw when stance changed.

The short version is, this isn't anything they can do anything about unless they start working on CoH2. Although, who knows, maybe customizable weapons will enable a way around it. One thought I've had is just to always use a weapon stance, and have "no weapon" as a weapon option. That will still need to distinguish between left handed, right handed and dual wield stances, but maybe something can be done.

What I've long wondered about this is why Shields don't suffer the same flaw. You don't pull the shield out after every attack, as if "stance" is a setting per hand and not per body. The game also somehow knows when you carry a shield not to use the two-handed animation for certain powers. Like--I assume since I've never tried it--Air Superiority.

Overall Shields seems like a much more intrusive system, so it's hard for me to say that redraw issues are completely unfixable, even if the result is some animations only animating with one hand (mainly the "put my hand to my head" psi blast types.) Most other powers I can think of don't have what look like would be significant amount of clipping issues. The "tarzan" animation in Tough, maybe. What's tricky though is Archery actually holds the bow in a different hand than Assault Rifle. Not sure how the game resolves this with temp powers and Shields.. isn't there even a temp power with a bow and arrow?

Login to the game with say a dual blades character,
put your weapons in your hands and type /emote bringit. Nothing happens but the weapons go away. The Bring It emote has been coded to call FXDESTROY to remove the swords from your hands. BaBs made that decision because it looks awful when you animate that Emote with the sword in your hand.

The same thing happens with Claws. you can't animate bringit with the claws out. The game kills the claws FX and you stand there and have to type /emote bringit a second time.

Babs made this decision based on aesthetics, and aesthetics is one of the most important things. I used to be able to do a ton of emotes with a weapon model in my hand, these days they're aren't that many. Babs and what ever help he had, went in and added code that flush out weapon.fx on all those emotes. BaBs was a professional and he really cared about his work, but he made certain design decisions that are not some concreate rule the guy whos now working in BaBs old cubicle.

Babs was working for Paragon Studios/NCSoft, the same people who still own the game and this was after he got new animation personnel to train, when he made those statements. He was lead animator for, what, four, five *years* and knew the animation system inside and out.

He said, point blank (paraphrasing here), "To eliminate redraw means redoing every animation of every primary weapon using set, every secondary set that can be used with every weapon using set, and that's just too much time to waste developing for a minimal benefit."

The animation system hasn't changed from then till now. It's still a massive waste of time and resources for a minimal return. You're basically looking at a year or two of no new animation work, no new enemy models, no new environmental animations, etc. in order to eliminate redraw.

Just thinking out loud, a solution to weapon redraw without affecting other powers at all.

For all weapon animations, have two set of animations (and two different set of attacks), One without weapons and one with. They'd also have marginally different cast times, to compensate for the weapon redraw. The trick then is to determine which attack to use when being activated. I know they can already do different emotes depending on whether a weapon is out. (glances at tantrum emote with shield out, or that example mentioned about which calls the weapon fx remove command on emote), but I don't know if it can apply to actual attacks.

Alternatively, having a weapon out could constitute as a "buff" like dual pistols swap ammo. That buff inherently changes the attack being called. If an attack is called without the "weapon" buff, it draws the weapon (and activates the buff) then executes a faster attack to compensate for the weapon drawtime, as elaborated above.