I'm angry about Staff Fighting!!

[Polecat]

4 hours ago, Maelwys said:

Looks like this differs depending on the model gender and size - the character model I've been using never grasps the "unwrapped" bit.

The staff of Stheno looks particularly ridiculous; even if it's a shorter weapon model than the rest...

Anyways; the discrepancy ought to be easy to rectify by stretching the weapon model a bit - see some of the currently "pointy at both ends" albeit asymmetrical options:

In this case whilst the male model is holding it closer to their chest; the female model still has their hand firmly on the central shaft (stop giggling, you at the back!)

 

This can be seen more clearly during the extend/retract stage of the thrust (I said STOP IT!)

To me it still looks like there's nothing wrong with the pose itself, only the points at which the model's hands are making contact with the weapon; which AFAIK is quite tweakable. It also ought to be possible to extend the "left" portion of the staff here a bit too (although admittedly there may be a bit of a balancing act between that and not accidentally cutting off their own feet during a Guarded Spin!)

(Pics snipped for brevity)

Actually, your set of pictures probably indicates an interesting problem that likely extends to all the weapons, and one I vaguely remember hearing when the game was live. The model of the weapon is dictated by the size of the avatar's hands. Thus the "heavy" model would have larger weapons than any, while the female model has the smallest. Now I freely admit I may be misremembering something, but a quick glance through the various weapons does make it SEEM like that's true at a glance....

 

If so, that could further complicate newer models, as it still requires one singular model fit all three body types.

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, Maelwys said:

If you take the second screenshot in my post further up as a reference point, at no stage in any of the attack animations do either of the character's hands touch the staff outside of the "wrapped" middle area. The Ranged attack (Serpent's Reach) does involve them holding the staff pretty close to their body then letting go with their "offhand" as they extend it out... but they're still grasping it in the middle with their main hand.

Checking just now, Eye of the Storm, about 3/4 of the way through the 'on your back' part of the animation, you're grasping the shaft near the butt, Serpent's Reach has you choke way down on the shaft right before the full extension, although it snaps back to the middle when you recover that it took me several repeats from different angles to be sure, and Sky Splitter pulls both hands down close to the butt right before the final overhead smash. All three of them are overlookable if you're not paying attention, so if you're willing to ignore them for the rest of the visuals, taking a pair of the VK-99 Event Horizon models, cut off the pommels, and butt the grips together would give you a fair version of a doublesaber, and taking the naginata staff style, removing the tsuba and blade, cutting the entire hilt off the VK-99 and mounting the blade on it would make a decent polesaber. Neither of them give you the brightness that a proper version would want, but CoH's game engine has... not issues, but entire subscriptions... with object lighting (if you have your detail turned up, in the warehouse maps, you can sometimes see faint white curved lines at the bottom of the illumination cones from the ceiling lights; these are the bottoms of the mostly-transparent polygons used to fake the lighting).

[srmalloy]

2 hours ago, Polecat said:

Actually, your set of pictures probably indicates an interesting problem that likely extends to all the weapons, and one I vaguely remember hearing when the game was live. The model of the weapon is dictated by the size of the avatar's hands.

This was a 'fix' put in back on Live; originally, the weapon models didn't resize with the character, resulting in Huge characters with tiny weapons, and TW characters with their height slider turned all the way down having truly anime-esque weapons, á la the Bustermarm from Fairy Tale. This was patched so that the weapons would scale more appropriately to the character's size, to the lamentation of some of the playerbase.

[Polecat]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

This was a 'fix' put in back on Live; originally, the weapon models didn't resize with the character, resulting in Huge characters with tiny weapons, and TW characters with their height slider turned all the way down having truly anime-esque weapons, á la the Bustermarm from Fairy Tale. This was patched so that the weapons would scale more appropriately to the character's size, to the lamentation of some of the playerbase.

You have a better memory than I. I might have been in CoH since release, but I won't claim my memory of what they did was very clear, beyond my annoyance at the Enhancement Diversification patch at the time (5 stacking damage was the only way my old rad defender used to stay relevant on DPS back in the day). Thank you for clarifying my hazy memory of it.

[srmalloy]

1 minute ago, Polecat said:

beyond my annoyance at the Enhancement Diversification patch at the time (5 stacking damage was the only way my old rad defender used to stay relevant on DPS back in the day).

I retired a level 49 Katana/Regen Scrapper over ED and the Great Regen Nerf; I'd built him to run five- or six-slotted damage, and Instant Healing running, relying on Focused Accuracy to get his hit chance back up to an acceptable level, where I'd learned where the sweet spot was for defeating enough mobs to reduce incoming damage to below his regen rate before he ran out of HP. Between ED and the 'restructuring' of Regen, it would have required completely restructuring the character as well as making me relearn the secondary from scratch.

[Britannic]

Would be nice to have a few spear options.

[Spaghetti Betty]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

grasping the shaft

 

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

choke way down on the shaft right before the full extension

*spits out coffee*

[Snarky]

[Maelwys]

[Luminara]

On 11/28/2024 at 3:42 PM, Spaghetti Betty said:

*spits out coffee*

 

Making room?

Also, you missed the butt stuff.

 

On 11/28/2024 at 11:53 AM, srmalloy said:

grasping the shaft near the butt

 

On 11/28/2024 at 11:53 AM, srmalloy said:

pulls both hands down close to the butt right before the final overhead smash

 

[Spaghetti Betty]

9 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Making room?

I prefer a different kind of noodle in my mouth!

[Seed22]

14 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

I prefer a different kind of noodle in my mouth!

The only noodle going in my mouth is ramen and yakamein. 
 

Now I’m hungry 🙃

[Polecat]

Despite the humor, I probably should gt the thread back on track and point out that, despite complaining about the powerset, this thread is about just wanting more cosmetic options for Staff Fighting. Personally, I'd be happy with a few Elemental options and maybe a couple more non-lethal looking options. But that latter one, Non-lethal weapons, has been a longstanding issue with CoH. I mean, we're cutting up people with swords, shooting them with bullets and rayguns, and it's only sending them to some teleporter that brings 'em back instantly, ready for round two? Yeah...  doubt. As someone who likes to play heroes, I at least like to pretend I'm using non-lethal options, and not...  lighting a person on fire until they die.

 

Comic logic is weird.

[srmalloy]

5 hours ago, Polecat said:

As someone who likes to play heroes, I at least like to pretend I'm using non-lethal options,

Shooting high-velocity, armor-piercing arrest warrants, yes...

[srmalloy]

On 11/28/2024 at 2:04 AM, Maelwys said:

To me it still looks like there's nothing wrong with the pose itself, only the points at which the model's hands are making contact with the weapon; which AFAIK is quite tweakable.

The issue at this point becomes "Is it worth the effort to prioritize having all of the offending animations reworked in order for a double-'bladed' staff to be used without the wielder looking like they're injuring themselves, when the weapon model in question isn't even in the game now, and would have to be added in addition to all of the animation changes?"

[Maelwys]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

The issue at this point becomes "Is it worth the effort to prioritize having all of the offending animations reworked in order for a double-'bladed' staff to be used without the wielder looking like they're injuring themselves, when the weapon model in question isn't even in the game now, and would have to be added in addition to all of the animation changes?"

Admittedly it's been a while since I looked into the animation gubbins; but IIRC the way weapons "attach" to your character's model can be adjusted for each custom weapon in a single line of text in one file per body gender rather than having to poke at each of the individual power animations.

Under the hood there's the "you the player" entity that stands there and waves your arms + hands about; and there's another "your current weapon" entity that also moves around completely independently. In order to get it to look like your character is wielding the weapon; these two entities get overlayed on top of each other. Weapons get "attached" to your character model via a set of default root coordinates which corresponds to the relevant bone on the player character's skeleton (left hand + right hand work independently for stuff like Dual Blades IIRC).
Each custom weapon gets a seperate FX file per body type (so three small text files per regular custom weapon - one for huge, one for female, one for male. Dual Blades gets six because it can use both hands). Each FX file contains a link to the relevant anim "model" used for that custom weapon; and they can also contain a link to a 'behaviour' file which can be used to offset or flip/rotate/otherwise adjust that model relevant to the defaults and is how scaling weapons for different body types works.

So in practice, somewhere on the server is going to be something like "Fem_Broadsword_Gladius01.fx" which defines the Custom Weapon on a female gendered character; and links to a file called "Female_WepRScale.bhvr" which in turn contains two lines that resize and reposition the weapon relative to the defaults in order to get it looking right on a female gendered body; e.g:
PositionOffset 0.0375 0.0125 0.0
Scale 0.85 0.85 0.85

Therefore tweaking a "double bladed staff" to get it bigger/smaller/moved a bit to the left/etc can be done by simply creating a new behaviour file and adding in a few lines of text; there's no need to go poking at the more complicated internal animations or textures. It's only if you need to redo the movement of the animation itself (e.g. you can't get the weapon to look right with the existing animation no matter how you rescale or reposition that weapon on the player's model!) that you'd need to delve deeper.

[srmalloy]

On 11/30/2024 at 8:22 AM, Polecat said:

shooting them with bullets

They're not bullets; they're steel-jacketed, high-velocity, armor-piercing... arrest warrants.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Maelwys said:

Admittedly it's been a while since I looked into the animation gubbins; but IIRC the way weapons "attach" to your character's model can be adjusted for each custom weapon in a single line of text in one file per body gender rather than having to poke at each of the individual power animations.

Under the hood there's the "you the player" entity that stands there and waves your arms + hands about; and there's another "your current weapon" entity that also moves around completely independently. In order to get it to look like your character is wielding the weapon; these two entities get overlayed on top of each other. Weapons get "attached" to your character model via a set of default root coordinates which corresponds to the relevant bone on the player character's skeleton (left hand + right hand work independently for stuff like Dual Blades IIRC).
Each custom weapon gets a seperate FX file per body type (so three small text files per regular custom weapon - one for huge, one for female, one for male. Dual Blades gets six because it can use both hands). Each FX file contains a link to the relevant anim "model" used for that custom weapon; and they can also contain a link to a 'behaviour' file which can be used to offset or flip/rotate/otherwise adjust that model relevant to the defaults and is how scaling weapons for different body types works.

So in practice, somewhere on the server is going to be something like "Fem_Broadsword_Gladius01.fx" which defines the Custom Weapon on a female gendered character; and links to a file called "Female_WepRScale.bhvr" which in turn contains two lines that resize and reposition the weapon relative to the defaults in order to get it looking right on a female gendered body; e.g:
PositionOffset 0.0375 0.0125 0.0
Scale 0.85 0.85 0.85

Therefore tweaking a "double bladed staff" to get it bigger/smaller/moved a bit to the left/etc can be done by simply creating a new behaviour file and adding in a few lines of text; there's no need to go poking at the more complicated internal animations or textures. It's only if you need to redo the movement of the animation itself (e.g. you can't get the weapon to look right with the existing animation no matter how you rescale or reposition that weapon on the player's model!) that you'd need to delve deeper.

The weapon model is sized for the character model. The weapon model does not change size when being used in animations. So a weapon sized for a max height huge character and a min height any character will stay that size through all the set's animations and simply get plugged into the specific attack's animation sequence. Neither do the animations change to account for the weapons' size and design. Which is why some weapons in staff fighting wind up not being held for the attack as described earlier in the thread. So for a double-ended bladed staff, the animations will still have the character gripping the off-blade for the mentioned attacks.

[Maelwys]

57 minutes ago, Rudra said:

The weapon model is sized for the character model. The weapon model does not change size when being used in animations. So a weapon sized for a max height huge character and a min height any character will stay that size through all the set's animations and simply get plugged into the specific attack's animation sequence. Neither do the animations change to account for the weapons' size and design. Which is why some weapons in staff fighting wind up not being held for the attack as described earlier in the thread. So for a double-ended bladed staff, the animations will still have the character gripping the off-blade for the mentioned attacks.

Certainly... and all that corresponds to what I said above.

Each custom weapon gets sized for the character model via a single FX file that is unique for that custom weapon on that character's gender. Linking a Behaviour file within this FX file can adjust the scale of the weapon; reposition it (relative to the default attachment origin point on a character skeleton IIRC) or even flip/rotate it. These changes don't kick in differently for each power animation, they only kick in the once for each custom weapon. 
This means a single custom weapon will end up the same size and orientation and position across all animations that use it.
But two different custom weapons can have completely different scales/positions/orientation because they're using two different Behaviour files to modify how that weapon appears. Even if they're using the same root weapon model and texture.

Therefore without changing the power animations themselves (I 100% agree that'd likely require lots of work!) I'm fairly certain that it's possible to tweak CustomStaffA to always be held back-to-front; let alone simply making it a little smaller and moving it so that it gets held a few inches closer to the body compared to CustomStaffB... and I suspect that those minor tweaks to a behaviour text file might just be enough to allow for some kind of double-sided laser stick that didn't obviously amputate the wielder's shoulder/feet/whatever to the point that the average CoH gamer's suspension of disbelief gets overridden.
 

Edited December 6 by Maelwys

[Rudra]

17 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

Certainly... and all that corresponds to what I said above.

Each custom weapon gets sized for the character model via a single FX file that is unique for that custom weapon on that character's gender. Linking a Behaviour file within this FX file can adjust the scale of the weapon; reposition it (relative to the default attachment origin point on a character skeleton IIRC) or even flip/rotate it. These changes don't kick in differently for each power animation, they only kick in the once for each custom weapon. 
This means a single custom weapon will end up the same size and orientation and position across all animations that use it.
But two different custom weapons can have completely different scales/positions/orientation because they're using two different Behaviour files to modify how that weapon appears. Even if they're using the same root weapon model and texture.

Therefore without changing the power animations themselves (I 100% agree that'd likely require lots of work!) I'm fairly certain that it's possible to tweak CustomStaffA to always be held back-to-front; let alone simply making it a little smaller and moving it so that it gets held a few inches closer to the body compared to CustomStaffB... and I suspect that those minor tweaks to a behaviour text file might just be enough to allow for some kind of double-sided laser stick that didn't obviously amputate the wielder's shoulder/feet/whatever to the point that the average CoH gamer's suspension of disbelief gets overridden.
 

I think you are misconstruing things, because we can currently see with the shorter weapons that that is not the case. However, I am not up for yet another circular argument, so I'm just going to leave it at that.