Power Pool attacks and redraw

Hi folks,

Like many others, I've been having a lot of fun with the new weapon power sets. I love the way they fit my character concepts.

I also have a nasty tendency to take the Fighting pool, as if you're aiming to boost defence/defense it lets you improve it by +3% (or +6% if rich) in Tough and +more in Weave.

But this leaves me with a power pick I NEVER use, in Boxing or Kick. I rarely use it on alts that don't have a weapon, but given the redraw, it never sees by bar on weapon users.

It then struck me, why not use the already coded Brawl animation for Boxing, and by extension Air Superiority? I'll grant you that Flurry, Kick and Jump Kick wouldn't translate so easily, but even just those 2 having their animations changed would mean I could get an attack chain without redraw a lot faster without as much animation work.

What do you all think, is it a reasonable idea?

This one has always puzzled me, especially when brawl has, as mentioned, already got animations to use. Which would work fine for Boxing. Kick might take a tad more work...might. I just don't see why this hasn't happened already...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

When you brawl with the Trick Arrow/Archery Bow out, you do a Kick animation which doesn't put away the weapon. Why that can't be ported over into the actual Kick Pool Power is something of a mystery ...

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Ive always thought the same thing and I think this is a great suggestion and should seriously be looked into.

The answer is "activation sequences." Every power in the game has an activation sequence, which includes expecting what "mode" the character is in before the power animates. If the character is not in this mode, the character is taken in this mode by taking away a weapon, pulling out a weapon, setting hands on fire and so forth. Some attacks, like Brawl, are coded to expect multiple modes and play different animations for each mode, but this does not appear to be trivial to create and, most importantly, maintain. BABs mentioned numerous times how Brawl is the most complex animation in the game and how he didn't want to replicate this unless absolutely necessary.

His other argument was one of completeness. Can he afford to do that JUST for Kick since that already works? What about Boxing? What about Reconstruction? What about Web Grenade? I actually did bring up exactly this problem to him - make Kick work like Brawl works for Archery, and that was a part of the argument then. I don't remember the whole argument, but this was a part of it.

Additionally, Shield Defence is instituted in a similar way. Shields are essentially weapons with their own activation sequences and all powers that can ever be used with them have to expect to be used with this activation sequences. When creating this power set, the great majority of the work BABs and his team did was just fixing up activation sequences for existing powers even though the new animations were exact clones of the old ones. There are relatively few new animations for Shield Defence specifically, though a number are "tweaked" to blend in better. As I understand it, the majority of the work was just what you describe - making sure all powers a Shield Defence character could ever use wouldn't try to put the shield away.

There's also the problem that the game's animation engine can sometimes have a loose interpretation of what it's expected to do. If the engine is told to fire up an animation that doesn't exist, it'll do some kind of next-best match and play whatever comes up. That's why doing /em bow with a Katana out used to do a bow-firing animation back in I1, why Whirling Sword started playing the Whirlwind animation when falling down and I assume that's why Heightened Senses is now doing the Dragon's Tail animation instead of what it had before (the "jumping out of a snake hole, looking around" one).

This is like the problem of removing redraw: It seems simple, but there's more to it than you think. Specifically, removing redraw wasn't as simple as just removing it. BABs tried and the system refused to work because it expected SOMETHING there. You can also see what happen when you remove redraw in the effect asynchronity in Titan Weapons. If you use an attack with momentum without having drawn your weapon, the attack will fire early, but the effects will delay for the animation time plus the draw time. It's also evident in what Assassin's Strike out of combat used to do, which is not play ANY animation if you didn't have your weapons drawn.

The City of Heroes animation system is a lot more finicky than it seems like it should be.

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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.