Are snake bottoms possible?

[A.Minion]

They are technically in the game, so is there a possibility to make them available for players?  

 

p.s. thanks for saving me from WOW Classic

[ZeeHero]

Could play FFXIV and not WoW classic, I play that and COH. but jokes aside I am not sure snake bottoms would work for PCs for animation reasons.

[Flashtoo]

Snake bottoms for PCs would require an entire new body type (Two, if we are to get both male and female snake people) with all new bottom-half animations for every power set that does a lot of moving around below the waist - most notably Martial Arts and Street Justice with the kicking, but probably anything at all that isn't a really arm-centric blast set would need to be redone from the ground up. Also, every costume piece that currently exists that goes on the waist or higher would have to be reworked to fit the new snake skeletons...

 

...Basically don't hold your breath.

[Starhammer]

I remember the devs addressing this way back when, saying the snake bottoms wouldn't work with some animations. That's certainly a legitimate concern when you have to develop a professional grade product that people pay money for. But considering the state of things now, if someone could hack and stitch snake bottoms into the costume creator, in spite of bad animations, I would neither turn my nose up at them nor disparage anyone else for using them.

[KalSpiro]

On 8/21/2019 at 12:40 AM, Flashtoo said:

Snake bottoms for PCs would require an entire new body type (Two, if we are to get both male and female snake people) with all new bottom-half animations for every power set that does a lot of moving around below the waist - most notably Martial Arts and Street Justice with the kicking, but probably anything at all that isn't a really arm-centric blast set would need to be redone from the ground up. Also, every costume piece that currently exists that goes on the waist or higher would have to be reworked to fit the new snake skeletons...

 

...Basically don't hold your breath.

It doesn't actually need a new body type, it just needs to be a lower body option alongside monster legs and pants.  It might also be possible to lock it out for anyone using the kicking power sets, unless someone actually wants to figure out how to animate snake tails to do the kicking.  For anything outside of kicking it's possible there is a sufficient analogue in the animations that already exist for snake people to handle the rest.

 

But still, yeah, probably not.

[Flashtoo]

Speaking as someone fairly familiar with what goes into creating and animating game player models: Yes, it actually would need to be a new body type because of the animations involved - either that or the existing bodies we have would have to have their skeletons edited to accommodate snake tail bones. Concept-wise it's not hard to imagine tail slaps for kick animations, but since the existing models and their bones weren't set up to handle that stuff to begin with... The 'monstrous' legs with their bent beast-feet that we have are pretty much a hack, and only mostly work with the biped animations; just look what happens if you use /e crouch (your legs phase through themselves). The monstrous legs at least still conform more or less to the same thigh/shin/foot structure that normal human legs have, but the geometry is distorted into that shape. It's hard to explain without diagrams but you CANNOT make a snake tail conform to those bones, and the bone setup for snaky NPCs wasn't made to be able to do the lower-body animations you see in Staff Fighting or Dual Pistols either, things would distort and stretch and look generally bizarre if it even animated at all.