Archer grabbing bow from off their back

[Ishtvan]

Archers need to hold the bow in their left hand when attacking, and it's going to start out strapped across their back. Something like the Builder's animation for drawing the hammer from their back would probably work, but with their left hand instead of right.

 

Do we have an animation for this already? I was trying to test the archer to get the attachment position for the bow right, but I noticed they don't play a draw weapon animation for the bow that reattaches the bow to their hand. They try to play the draw sword animation, drawing a non-existant sword with their right hand, and this fails obviously.

 

If we don't already have this animation, we need it. If it's there, we need to alter spawnargs/script to make them use that instead of the sword drawing animation.

[Springheel]

I don't believe we have any bow animations for the new skeleton.

 

We'd need:

 

Draw/sheath bow

 

Grab arrow (could probably just use right-hand draw from back)

 

Draw bow

 

Fire bow

 

I assume the last two should be separate animations so the AI can pause to aim in between.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, I guess I won't worry about the attach positions for a while until we have those anims. The only one we can really test now is slung across the back.

[Noisycricket]

Need some more info for the bow animations.

 

1. Do we have the exact bow were going to be using all or most of the time so i can make the animation more exact and natural? How about the quiver and arrows?

 

2. What do you want the placement of the bow to be, and can we get this set up before i start the animations so i can make them as realistic as possible?

 

3. How fast do you want the time between shots?

 

 

 

Heres a reference, 7 seconds between shots. If you think thats fast, check

out. Now, i just reference those to illustrate the high-end of the range, but i think a medieval, this-is-what-pays-the-bills guard/bowman is going to be around 9-15 seconds, what do you think?

[greebo]

The fire rate will be controlled by code, so you don't need to worry about the interval. Ideally, the animations are split into parts:

 

Preparation: draw the bow from the back.

 

Anim 1: Raise the bow and start drawing the string back (~ 2 seconds)

Anim 2: Holding the bow like this (aiming, can wave a little bit, needs to be a cycle, code controls time)

Anim 3: Fire, let go of the string and put the bow down again afterwards (~ 1.5 seconds)

 

I'm not sure whether Anim 1 also needs to include the arrow placement (draw one from the quiver and put it on the string).

[Springheel]

There are existing longbow and shortbow models; the AI will be using models without strings when firing, so that the animation doesn't have to be 100% exact.

 

 

I guess it's probably easiest if the archer does not pull out an arrow until he is ready to fire...otherwise we'd need a separate animation for searching while having a bow and arrow out.

[Ishtvan]

Having them hold the arrow waiting to fire seems like it would require a lot of code changes. As Spring pointed out, they would need to either play alternate walking animations or know not to walk or run during this phase. They would also need some timer so that they stopped doing it after some time of not being able to hit the enemy.

 

For now it's probably easiest to do the draw and fire all in one animation. If we want to make it faster so the player can't dodge behind cover as easily, we could just ignore the grabbing the arrow from quiver motion and "pretend" they already have an arrow nocked when they've got the bow drawn. So the fire animation would just be: draw back bow and immediately fire. We had this working on the old skeleton, and it looked okay.

 

That cuts down the stuff we need to 3 animations and no code changes:

1. Grab bow from back (and code will keep it attached to their hand)

2. Draw and fire

3. Return bow to their back

 

Some archers we might want to set to always have their bow drawn, those guarding critical positions like front gates, for example. Because otherwise the draw from back part will limit how quickly they can respond to someone trying to run through the front gate.

 

If we have time for the code changes required to hold the bow drawn and wait to fire, without walking or running, we could do that, just seems like it would take a lot more work.

[Springheel]

2. Draw and fire

 

I'd combine this with drawing the arrow from the quiver. That's how it worked in the old animation. When the AI is ready to fire, they play that animation, and then code can pause at the moment where the bow is drawn back (so they don't always fire like a robot).

 

Some archers we might want to set to always have their bow drawn,

 

We could probably get away with using the current animations for that (the AI wouldn't be closing their left hand around the bow completely, but it could work in a pinch. We'd have to make sure they didn't play any idle animations that would make them impale themselves on their bow though (I guess this also holds true for torch-carriers).

[Crispy]

Is there any need to have a "cancel attack" animation for bow-firing (i.e. once the bow is in the drawn position, relax it and um... I guess drop the arrow), or does the AI not have such a behaviour anyway?

[Ishtvan]

@Crispy: That would have to be added to the AI code, and would require an extra animation if we don't just want them to teleport back to un-drawn (recovering after drawing). I still think it's simplest to just draw and fire, no changes to AI code required. The randomness can come in terms of how often they do this, but if you want them to draw and hold it, that adds complications. If someone has time to code that, that's fine, if not, it's simplest to draw and fire with no pause.

[Crispy]

I'm not asking for a new AI behaviour; I'm asking if such an AI behaviour already exists, and noting that if it does then an animation would ideally be needed, to avoid teleporting back to the un-drawn state.

 

From what you're saying, it sounds like the AI never cancels a bow attack once it's drawn back the string (I guess it just fires anyway and misses if the enemy goes out of view?), so never mind.

[Ishtvan]

Juding by the throw-bottle animation, if they decide to switch from ranged to melee mid-animation (because you run at them), they will stop the throw animation before launching. It doesn't look nice, they just teleport back to the idle position, but they can stop mid-animation before they launch the projectile. I don't know if something similar applies to the projectile code if the player is no longer hit-able.

[Ishtvan]

As for when the player ducks behind a solid object when the AI is winding up to throw, looks like they just continue the animation and launch anyway, hitting the object. Not that big a disadvantage for them since they have infinite ammo.

[Crispy]

OK. Sounds like the latter is fine, and the former is regrettable but not high priority to fix. Besides, it might introduce a bit of an exploit if they're not able to melee with you immediately upon you coming into melee range. (Then again, maybe it's a valid tactic. *shrug*)

[Noisycricket]

At the time the code attaches the bow to the hand, does the hand needs to be in exactly the right orientation so it doesn't flip the bow into the body or jump to the hand?

 

Is there any flexibility or helpful options? As you can see from the photo, its going to be hard getting the animation to look natural. I can make it fast, but that will only help so much.

 

Another idea was to pull the bow up with the right hand about .3 meters (~1 foot) with the right hand, then grab it more naturally with the left. But sine we have two different bow sizes, the grab stop for one hand would still be off unless we have an animation for each bow size.

 

 

 

Edit: Was just checking out T3, and noticed angled the attachment position (I assumed thus far we were going with a purely vertical position ). The bow is angled, not vertical, and provides a more natural one handed grab. I recorded some video of the A.I. in T3 drawing its bow, its very natural looking and there doesn't seem to be any jerk when he grabs the bow.

 

[Domarius]

Yeah, we can change the way it's hung on his back to suit a good grabbing motion. Find something that looks good and then we'll change the way it's attached. AFAIK we don't have to move the actual attachment point, just adjust the offset of the bow once it's attached.

[Noisycricket]

Did you want to do all of the combat animations including the bow? I'm fine either way.

[greebo]

@Noisycricket: looking at the google docs animation sheet it appears you're the one assigned to the bow anims, so I think it's safe for you to do them, if you have time.

 

I hope we're not doing duplicate work here, definitely, but that's what the sheet is for in the first place.

[Noisycricket]

Except im the one who put my name down forgetting Domarious said he was doing the combat animations. Im happy to do them, just want to make sure Domarius didn't want to do them..

[Springheel]

I would expect the bow would be angled on the back as well. I don't think we need to be too exact with this. In T3, the AI just reach back vaguely for the weapons and they teleport into their hands, and that seemed to work well enough (especially since, by design, the player will not be that close to AI using that animation).

[Noisycricket]

Actually the draw-bow animation in T3 is very good. Using fraps, I took a 30 fps video of it and slowed it down to examine how they were doing it. Theres no jumping and the hand goes to the bow. Now the holster-bow animation, thats a different story, lots of feet sliding and the bow jumps.

[Domarius]

Yeah if you think you can do it without it popping, why not.

 

Go ahead and do the bow combat anims, I'd rather move onto converting my old anims to the new skeleton anyway

[Noisycricket]

I don't mind doing them, however I don't have a lot of time at the moment. Im switching careers and applying for jobs like mad. It might be awhile before i get anything done. I do have another idle animation half done thus far.

[Noisycricket]

Ok forget what i said about the bow draw animation being very good in T3. It turns out the video i recorded to view it was effectively less than 15fps, i re-recorded some video at a lower resolution and can see more detail. There is in fact some jumping in the T3 animation, around 6 inches. The animation is so fast however that my brain can't even notice it in real time.

 

The only way i can see to do it with one hand is will some well timed jumping. I can't see a way to place the bow of the back that looks good and also allows for a natural looking one-handed draw. Another option is the two-handed draw, where the right hand would lift up the bow a tad for the left hand to grab, but with two different bow sizes that might require a different animation for each bow size to look decent. Since a quick draw animation would be desirable anyway, imo, I'll keep progressing with the one handed and see how it looks.

[Noisycricket]

Ok i've got something good here i think. Almost done with the bow grab.

 

Question: Is the bow AI going to need his own walking and searching animations too?