Blackjack Attack Issues

[Ishtvan]

It turns out that the blackjack script was allowing you to skip a lot of the blackjack swing animation when you spammed the left mouse button. It did this by allowing a blend from the current attack animation into the next attack animation starting very early in the current animation. In other words, it basically skipped the end portion of the attack animation. This made the attack seem very fast, but in fact it wasn't playing the whole animation before it started it over again.

 

I modified the script to play the full animation. If we want a faster blackjack attack, we'll have to make a faster animation. With the new melee system, skipping out of the animation early is bad for two reasons:

 

1. To physically model the whole swing down of the blackjack, the whole animation must play. Suppose, for example, you're standing on a crate trying to KO an AI who's slightly below you. If the "swing down" animation stops halfway thru in order to start the next attack, the blackjack is never allowed to swing down low enough to actually collide with the AI's head slightly below you.

 

2. Animation frame commands are dictating when to start and stop testing the melee collision models (CMs). If the animation stops early, the weapon never gets the command to stop testing the current CM before it starts testing a CM for the next attack, and hard crashing ensues. I could try to change the system so that it keeps track of which animation told it to start testing, and automatically stops testing if that animation ends, but that would be a pain, may lead to problems later if we try to make the system more general, and in light of point 1, it seems like the attack animations should be allowed to play to the end anyway.

 

(Certain events like the attacker's death, pain, or getting parried may also stop an attack animation partway thru, but these events are much easier to catch than arbitrary skipping in scripts)

[New Horizon]

Can we scale the speed of the animation, without creating a whole new one? I think we've done it elsewhere.

[greebo]

I believe this is done by calling setAnimRate or setting the anim_rate spawnarg.

[Springheel]

If we want a faster blackjack attack,

 

Is anyone dissatisfied with the current animation speed? I've never had a problem with it.

[New Horizon]

Is anyone dissatisfied with the current animation speed? I've never had a problem with it.

 

I think the problem though is that the animation speed has seemed faster due to portions of it being dropped because of the way it was setup.

 

One thing I do have a problem with, is the sword draw and sheathing animations of the player. lol

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, that's correct, the animation speed was artificially fast when you spammed the attack button, because it let you skip most of the animation by blending into the next attack. I changed that in the script on SVN to let the anim play all the way through. The anim is noticeably slower. It still seems okay to me actually, but some might want it faster.

 

We could try setrate to adjust the animation rate, but I'm worried that might cause some frames to be skipped when it's used to speed things up, because I think it just adjusts the clock to run faster. Each game frame, it checks the clock to see what anim frame is supposed to be displayed. If it runs faster than the game frame clock of 60 Hz, I think those frames just don't get displayed. If it doesn't do the frames with the melee combat frame commands, that's a problem. I guess we have some leeway though if it's currently at 24 fps and we dont' get problems until it goes to 60 fps?

[Springheel]

Yeah, that's correct, the animation speed was artificially fast when you spammed the attack button,

 

What if you didn't spam the attack button? Wouldn't the animation be the same speed as it is now?

[New Horizon]

The speed seems fine to me actually. It's just a bit faster than T2 upon comparing the two anims.

[Ishtvan]

What if you didn't spam the attack button? Wouldn't the animation be the same speed as it is now?

I'm not sure what you're asking. With the old setup before I updated the script, if you didn't spam attack, the animation played fully through, so yeah the same speed it is now. Now that it's "fixed", it should be the same speed whether you spam the attack button or not (the difference is that now the animation speed limits the "repeat rate" when you spam the attack button faster than the animation can play).

 

If there's a section of the animation that is just there for aesthetics and we don't mind skipping it when rapidly attacking, we still can of course, it just won't be tested by the melee system during those frames that are skipped. I'd still prefer to make the animations faster if we want to attack faster though, since that is more transparent and requires less maintenance when we are tweaking things.

[Springheel]

I just wanted to confirm that the speed I currently see it (since I don't spam the attack button) is the default speed we're talking about. Since it is, I can say I personally think the current animation rate is fine.

[Dram]

I'm not sure what you're asking. With the old setup before I updated the script, if you didn't spam attack, the animation played fully through, so yeah the same speed it is now. Now that it's "fixed", it should be the same speed whether you spam the attack button or not (the difference is that now the animation speed limits the "repeat rate" when you spam the attack button faster than the animation can play).

 

If there's a section of the animation that is just there for aesthetics and we don't mind skipping it when rapidly attacking, we still can of course, it just won't be tested by the melee system during those frames that are skipped. I'd still prefer to make the animations faster if we want to attack faster though, since that is more transparent and requires less maintenance when we are tweaking things.

 

Nooooo, I personally feel that the blackjack already moves too fast. I know I can easily set the animrate to slower locally so that it swings for longer, but seriously, we don't want to allow the thief to be able to circle-strafe-blackjack the guards, it's just plain stupid. The speed at which the BJ was swung in T1/2 was perfect imo, you had to make sure you got the timing right, and had a very smooth feel to it, like every other movement in the game.

[Ishtvan]

I just wanted to confirm that the speed I currently see it (since I don't spam the attack button) is the default speed we're talking about. Since it is, I can say I personally think the current animation rate is fine.

Yeah, that's the default speed. I may have misspoken, the animation speed didn't change at all, just the rate at which you can repeat the attack (that used to let you skip a lot of the animation).

 

Nooooo, I personally feel that the blackjack already moves too fast. I know I can easily set the animrate to slower locally so that it swings for longer, but seriously, we don't want to allow the thief to be able to circle-strafe-blackjack the guards, it's just plain stupid. The speed at which the BJ was swung in T1/2 was perfect imo, you had to make sure you got the timing right, and had a very smooth feel to it, like every other movement in the game.

I was speaking in general, for future melee combat attacks. I already said the current anim and havng to wait until it's finished feels fine to me.

 

Other topic:

When do we want the "missed" (whoosh!) sound to play when you swing and don't hit anything? I guess it should play after all the possible melee testing is done, so when it can't possibly hit anything else (otherwise you could hear the missed sound and then the hit sound). Right? Hopefully that doesn't put it too late in the animation. I think it should be okay.

[Dram]

Other topic:

When do we want the "missed" (whoosh!) sound to play when you swing and don't hit anything? I guess it should play after all the possible melee testing is done, so when it can't possibly hit anything else (otherwise you could hear the missed sound and then the hit sound). Right? Hopefully that doesn't put it too late in the animation. I think it should be okay.

 

Well here's the trick - You play a "swing" sound, not a "missed" sound. That way, even if it misses or hits it sounds correct. The current swing sound is terrible imo, too high pitch and generic, we need a deep bassy swing sound, and it needs to be relatively subtle (breaks immersion when the sound should be easily heard by the nearby guards), much like in T1/2.

[Ishtvan]

Well here's the trick - You play a "swing" sound, not a "missed" sound. That way, even if it misses or hits it sounds correct. The current swing sound is terrible imo, too high pitch and generic, we need a deep bassy swing sound, and it needs to be relatively subtle (breaks immersion when the sound should be easily heard by the nearby guards), much like in T1/2.

That could end up sounding weird if you hit them early on in the swing though. It would go whoo*smack*oosh. I guess if you stop the missed sound from playing it might work. You would always hear the whoosh sound beginning though, might that be weird? In D3 and seemingly every other game, the whoosh sound didn't start right at the beginning of the attack, there was a single moment where it decides whether it was a swing or miss. It could work if we started a *whoosh* sound right after we're done testing the attack, assuming it didn't hit anything. The only danger is it might seem too late if we are still testing for collisions far into the animation.

[Dram]

In T1/2 it played from the start and did the hit on the head with the whoosh still playing. I don't think it will sound weird, if anything, having it play too late sounds weird.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, you might be right, and we can definitely try it that way.

[Ishtvan]

I added the *whoosh* sound to the animation now, so it always plays even if you hit something. It seems to work fairly well.

 

Also, it sounds like everyone's satisfied with the speed of the attack animation, so we probably don't need to do anything with it. Time to start working on the shortsword attacks...