[MUD-Dev] Better Combat (long)

[Zach Collins (Siege)]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, David Kennerly wrote:
> Zach Collins wrote:

>> A player decides to learn the 'disarm' skill.  The skill is
>> practiced up (a random disarm animation is downloaded to be
>> displayed during the required practice time and others gradually
>> streamed in as bandwidth constraints allow), and then tried out
>> in battle.

> Does the disarm animation have to be downloaded from the server to
> the client?  If so, does each observer of this player then, in
> turn, also have to download the disarm animation from the server?
> Is it prohibitive, because of the huge number of combinations, to
> include the animation on the client installation?

To be perfectly honest, I pulled that example out of my shorts.  I
got a bit excited about combining several of my favorite
technologies, and laid out something one might hear in a
brainstorming session during a game's design phase.

Truthfully, if most or all of the animations' tweening was done in
development, then these animations would probably have been included
on the game CDs; and then training one's skill would more likely
either set a flag or increase the probability of achieving a given
maneuver during combat.  With live tweening on the user's CPU, there
would be less material to load initially, but more processing time,
and compromises would have to be made between a given user seeing
his/her own attack vs other users in the area seeing or being seen.

It would also mean designing a custom animation file format to cover
how a given node of the model's skeleton moves from position A to
position B (straight or curve, basically); and a special module
which could know when and how to halt or transition an interrupted
animation into an appropriate response.  This scene could be the
result:

The character is suddenly blocked and disarmed in the middle of an
axe swing, causing the axe to become a separate object which falls
to the ground, and the disarmed character to stagger.  The enemy
takes advantage of recovery time to thrust its sword, scoring a hit.
Some random player comes by and takes the axe.  (Uh-oh, is this
griefing?  I haven't covered any of the theoretical game's social or
justice systems, so it may or may not be.)

--
Zach Collins
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