About weapon redraw: I thought of a weird way to potentially fix it.

So I was on my way to see the movies today and I started thinking about how much redraw bothers a lot of players -- myself included on occasion (and don't ask how I got onto that tangent. My mind is crazy!) -- and I think I've come up with a potential solution that may seem a little weird.. but it wouldn't require TOO much alteration to animations/coding and would ease the problem of redraw on not just one weapon set, but multiple weapon sets on one character... I think. Read below and tell me what you think!

*Let's say you have two or three weapon sets. For the sake of this example, we'll say you have two sets that have similar cast/animation times, "Giant Bat Melee" and "Water Gun Blast".
*The obvious problem here is that when you attempt to put away your giant bat or draw out your water gun to shoot at something, it causes redraw the next time you draw EITHER weapon.
*Here's the proposed solution: "Dynamic Animation Times", or DAT. Again, just a silly gimmicky name. To explain in detail, a DAT would take notice of the difference between drawing a weapon for the first time to make an attack and REDRAWING a weapon. When it detects you're drawing a weapon for the first time in a while (i.e. redraw would do minimal harm if any), DAT does nothing. However, when redraw occurs (i.e. you're in combat and you're switching a weapon), DAT will slightly speed up the entire animation, redraw included, to match the USUAL cast/animation time for that power. I feel that DAT should activate if you've recently used an attack power regardless of it is a weapon set or not.

Here's an example with totally made up numbers in case my rambling isn't clear. It probably isn't anyway:
Standard Animation Time: The default cast time for a power
DAT Animation: How long it should take to animate when DAT occurs
Giant Bat Swing SAT = 1.67s
Giant Bat Swing with DAT Animation (1.25s cast + 0.42s DATA makeup) = 1.67s
Water Gun Blast SAT = 2.00s
Water Gun Blast with DAT Animation (1.70s cast + 0.30s DATA makeup) = 2.00s

So, effectively, even if you put away your weapon and are forced to redraw or draw another weapon for whatever reason or circumstance, 'DAT' speeds up the animation just slightly (so it doesn't look awkward) to make up for lost time spent during the animation. I think this is a good way to satisfy the DPA nuts in all of us as well as eliminating the nuisance that is redraw.

Also, the appearance of drawing and attacking with a weapon just slightly 'faster' sounds like it would look pretty cool... and since weapons already disappear from your hands when you redraw this shouldn't be too far of a stretch, IMHO!

Any thoughts? C:

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<[V]>IRTUE Player
Active 50s: Malevolency: (50+3 SS/WP Brute) / Sky-Scar (50+1 Robots/Dark MM) / Venomvein: (50+1 Crab) / Warlocked (50+1 BS/Shield Scrapper) / Some 50s Inactive

Simply speeding up the animations probably wouldn't look all that good (BAB had said something similar in the past). Some of the draw times seem decently long... what happens when the draw time is 2/3rd of the power's animation time? That'll look pretty silly.


This is actually sort of how things originally worked (or were SUPPOSED to work): There was a gap at the end of every attack, the length of the draw time. Although in this case, it made weapon sets look absurd because after you took a swing, you'd just be standing there for a full second. Didn't help that quite often the times were entirely wrong (IIRC, there was one power that was FASTER with redraw!).

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Fair points, though I wonder if that was due to technological limitations back in the day. I also would rather have animations occasionally look a little wonky (who's to say they can't be fine-tuned?) and not have to suffer redraw but that's IMHO!

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<[V]>IRTUE Player
Active 50s: Malevolency: (50+3 SS/WP Brute) / Sky-Scar (50+1 Robots/Dark MM) / Venomvein: (50+1 Crab) / Warlocked (50+1 BS/Shield Scrapper) / Some 50s Inactive

Animations are not the problem. It's simple enough to just drop the draw animation and move straight onto the attack in terms of visuals. You'd think it'd look odd, but it doesn't. A menagerie of different bugs over the years have shown that it looks pretty good.

The problem is in the animation rigging. Each animation requires its own "activation sequence," which is a term that describes the package of basic run and jump animations. This ensures you actually grip the sword and that the fire around your hands doesn't get left behind (this happens when it turns off). According to BABs, the engine expects "something" to happen when entering a non-standard activation sequence, and that just removing the animation doesn't work.

You can see this problem at work right now if you play Titan Weapons - the "with Momentum" animations are not rigged rigged well with their activation sequences and draw animations. If you have Momentum but don't have your Titan Weapon out and use a power with a Momentum-specific animation, the power's actual effect will be delayed for the duration of the weapon draw. The animation will play, but the effects will show up late. I don't know what causes this, but it demonstrates it's not something that's simple to mess with. You could also see this with the new Stalker Assassin's Strike, where using Assassin's Strike out of combat without your weapon drawn would start the power, but its animation will be overridden by the draw and would neither play nor actually root you. I believe this is because most Assassin's Strikes actual animation time is shorter than the draw, but that's just conjecture.

Basically, it's a question of wrestling with the quirks of the system. Unless you know them - and I'm pretty sure no player really does - suggesting changes just runs into Standard Code Rant. We simply don't know what it takes. BABs started doing some work which would remove redraw in such a way that it only ever plays if you can't actually start the attack you clicked to draw with, but ran into problems with this and Shield Defence, then he left the company and we have no contact with an animator willing to explain these things at this time.

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