New Rigs

First, the rigs I'd like:

Multi-armed a la Spinnerette and Kali

Snake Tailed a la Snakes, Gorgons, Spiritualists

Bestial (male and female) a la Beast (can kind of do this now with beast run..but that's rather heavy end cost for flavor)

Huge Female (not really my wish persay, but I know some people want it)

**********************

In order of difficulty easiest to hardest:

Bestial (really just a tweak of stance would almost do it, might need longer limbs as well)

Huge Female (minor tweaking of Huge Male)

Snake-Tailed

Multi-Armed

***************************

Ideal: Whole new rigs for each that have all power sets available.

What is stopping it: animation and costumes

Consider that over the past 7 years we have gained the animations and costume pieces currently available to the three existing rigs

Huge Female and Bestial are the most feasible and even there you would have clipping issues repeated several thousand or more times.

Let's look at snake-tailed real quick:

*****************************

From the waist up most of the same animations can be used. From the waist down all animations have to be changed. Since animations aren't really seperated into waist up and waist down, that means that all animations would have to be changed.

now, some coding may be copied over, but it will have to be tweaked to make sure all body parts move in tandem

the legs are not as often used as the hands due to the rooting that triggering some powers causes, so you can probably get by with a handful of stock animations like:

sway, rear back, slight sway, hold, etc

kicks in Power Pools, Martial Arts and Street Justice, jumping powers and the like will need to be completely redone from ground up

imagine the time it takes to produce 1 new power set, now multiply that by 88 power sets.

now, take the amount of time it takes to put out one new costume set and multply that by 70.

That's the probably the absolute minimum amount of accumulated hours that will be needed for the Snake rig to be made available to us with full customization options.

Now, we have snake-tailed enemies, so some of this work has already been done, but only the basic level....they still need to produce new animations and adjust costuming options for the snake tail to make it available to us.

******************

The multi-armed rig, is a bit more difficult because it lacks the resource of an already existing rig as the snake-tailed rig would. Also, with multi arms, a larger number of animations would have to be totally redone since arms are MUCH more active in this game and you don't want those extra arms just doing nothing.

In either case, I'd have to say one hundred thousand man-hours is an implausible amount of time in the case of the snake-tailed rig and deep into unreasonable for the multi-armed rig. (as in it should take much longer for both)

Also, now that I think about it, multiply those times by 2 to account for both male and female builds.

We are more likely to get unique rigs like this as specific EATs, which is a much easier to accomplish task.

However....I still want these rigs available to the common power sets rather than as EATs since I doubt the EATs will match many of my concepts for a character....in both cases, the character is likely to be a ranged/support style character rather than an up front fighter as adverse Runya here:



or Soda



or, the adverse, we'll get a snake-tailed set that is all lunges and constrictions and ignoring the possible mystical support staff and likewise for a burly multi-armed brawler instead of the mystical Deva character (which I know Soda looks like, but she's a melee)

In any case...I know these rigs are at the very least unfeasible, but I still think that they would make an excellent addition to the game.

I'm actually more interested in the multi-armed version, since I only really have one naga-esque character in mind and she'd be an expy off of my Runya above and be basically a spear(staff) wielding paladin type.

But I can think of several multi-armed characters from burly, muscular brawlers to gentle, serene mystics....

however, before we see multi-armed characters for players, we likely see them as enemies first...possibly for Arachnos or maybe a Hindu mythos themed issue/enemy set....

I honestly think that a multi-armed sort of thing would be somewhat easier to work around if it were a back option in the vein of wings rather than an entirely new rig.

Even still, it's probably unlikely.

My choice is for more bottom rigs. No-legs options like a hover pad or helicopter rotors would be neat. Spider legs. We have a four legged rig so centaur leg options can't be far off. Snake/slug/ghost type tails to stand on and slither around. You do however need whole new running animation for a lot of these because pumping your arms while a snake tail slithers would look silly. It might still work for centaur legs though...



I think the problem with 4-arm rigs is that everyone is stuck on the one common style of 'under' arms that stick out of the arm pits. I think it looks cooler and makes more sense for CoH to do the less common 'shoulder stack' where it's like a second shoulder muscle on top of the normal one, angled upwards and out, maybe with an extra clavicle.

When using a low animation set like AR, they would lean forward and be menacing. When reaching up like a psionic 'head touch' they would lean back and be out of the way.

But even then you run into issues with variation. What are the hands doing? Are you going to expect fifty options of what they're holding / wearing? Are you fine with them just cycling an idle animation and not actually doing anything? - Do the devs think that lives up to their game?

The Crab pack was a new rig similar to the four arm rig suggestions and the devs still take flak for what it 'doesn't do every day even though thematically it's perfect, no one is satisfied with perfect. They want fifty versions of perfect to pick from.

:EDIT: i realize i am basically repeating whats already been said BUT i would like to illustrate that there is indeed a large number of players who want and understand the situation. DEVS, HALP US OUT!


they said no to new rigs like these because it would require new animations for all the poses, emotes, powers, etc.

but lots of the emotes work semi ok for the non-bipedal rigs [like snakes]. and i'm ok with the emotes that have lower body effects simply not firing if i can have a snake bottom. and i'm ok with having rigs like "snake monstrous bottom" to be somehow unavailable if i have "martial arts" as my powerset, or making the powers auto switch to having a punching animation.


my coralax NPC transform power shoots energy beems from it's foot. sooooo i dont see how any other silly outcomes make a difference.




still, most likely they wont give us new rigs cuz that means new work on already-finished things. and they prefer to give us entirely new things :/

:shrug: so maybe hope for some more affect self only de-toggling shape shifting powers at best.

:'(