Flow- wrote:

Sounds a little bit like twitch gaming to me. "Fire man casted meteor, hold shift to dodge"

The intention is not to have any twitch gaming, part of what made CoH CoH was that people who were not traditional gamers could play it easily, and that's probably why so many older gamers played it, so as a spiritual successor, we need to keep to that style.

I was a knockback King! That was my favorite hobby, going around blowing villains off the tops of buildings! Especially Circle rituals...

Steve

They are in fact two separate, if in several ways intertwined, subjects.

Game mechanics will be... whatever they need to be, which is a long and ongoing conversation with a mere several dozen different inter-coupled factors to consider. I have my personal interpretation, but it is based on a poll with a sample size of five, nor is it exactly an unbiased selection of respondents. But it boils down to "if it requires physical coordination, precise timing, or the ability to deal with multiple active-and-parallel trains of thought at once, *on a character that is not set up specifically to have that as a core mechanic*, it either is, or is right at the edge of, twitch gaming *for an MMO*". As an example, the "block" mechanic for CO is fundamentally a twitch mechanic. It relies on the ability to *detect* and *react* to the tells, and do so quickly enough that you have your shield *up* (not coming up, and it isn't actually instant, just very fast) when the incoming attack actually hits. And you have to be able to do it while in the middle of some *other* sequence of motions, then resume (or reset, sometimes to a non-obvious point!) that sequence as soon as you can safely drop your shield, to be very effective on a character that isn't built to be able to just shrug off anything thrown at it in the first place. In another example, any game where being *rooted by your own attack* is considered a significant game balance factor, in that it is used to balance out powerful attacks as a drawback, implies that move-and-attack together are an expected part of play style.

On the other topic:

Dealing with the animations and related items where mechanics meet (virtual) reality is something I can speak to at least briefly, before I fall over. As ever, this is all (extremely) subject to change for any number of reasons, or no reason at all, and could turn out to be precisely opposite what the released game needs to have. But it is a reasonable approximation of current thinking, unless someone swapped my brain for Foldger's Crystals again.

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[*]Basic combat and movement are driven by animations. This is really the only sane way to do stuff in a game; while it is (theoretically) possible to build something that would have precise enough muscle simulations that you could *make* it move using the physics engine, it would be a tremendous waste of processor cycles when the motion is going to be repetitive *anyway* (if you can code for different walking musculature, you can animate it just as easily, probably easier).
[*]Fine detail movement, or environment-reactive changes to movement, will be dealt with by physics blending. This is built into Unreal, and works well, but is not even remotely simple to get to look *good*. Even if you're not a sheep with finger-paints. The amount (and in many cases *type*) of motion that needs to be controlled by the physics engine, vs. the animation 'baseline', is dependent on at least half a dozen factors that I can think of just off the top of my head. So how much or the details of how it will apply, especially when in a situation as chaotic as combat, are something that won't be answerable in any meaningful way for quite a while to come.
[*]Coarse reactive movement (getting knocked off your feet or pushed back), *if it can happen at all*, will probably be handled by a combination of animation and physics, with a much stronger physics component -- not a true ragdoll, but the main reason for not being is so that it is possible to animate getting back up without having the limbs move through insane contortions to get to the starting point of the standing animation. Probably. But this one is probably the most likely out of anything here to turn out different from the current thinking.
[*]Death will almost certainly be ragdoll, or something very close to it. It might have some quirks, though. For example, we would probably want to "lock down" the body after it finishes the ragdoll collapse, so that it doesn't get kicked around willy-nilly by tromping minions... but we also might account for that in AI, and leave the body pure physics. Or something in between.
[*]Bodies will have mass (as in the physics engine sense). Ideally anything that is in any way able to react to a force by movement should, but that may or may not prove practicable. However, I really dislike the 'styrofoam boulder' effect, so I at least have some motivation to make sure we can handle this sanely.
[*]How much, if any, physics will affect movement under normal circumstances is up in the air. Support for things like ice or oil slicks being difficult to move on *is* on the list of highly desired behaviors, and looks to be supported straightforwardly by the engine, but isn't proven out yet.
[*]Melee powers (or ranged powers going off at point-blank range) and making them look at least realistic enough to avoid "okay, that's just silly" results, is a topic of current research. I can't speak to hit/miss mechanics of any sort, since that is a game design thing, but the engine does have at least some amount of flexibility built in to allow both blending and overlay of animations (turn a basic attack into a "step and attack" by adding a "step" overlay to the basic attack animation) and some degree of support for "pulling" an animation to be more precisely where it should (slashing at someone with a clawed hand tweaks the animation so that it actually contacts the target, rather than sweeping through the air in front of them, which is mostly what CoX did to avoid having to deal with the alternative issue of having the hand trying to go *through* them in some cases). How well this works and how much it can adjust without causing things to look incredibly weird is not yet tested in any practical sense, with the exception of the animation overlay, and that has only been tested in a couple of very narrow cases that don't really have the tight constraints of a combat animation.
[*]Ranged powers will probably come in several flavors, and it will affect what animations can be used with what attacks, to at least some extent. Taking only simple ranged single-target attacks (because it was the example folks started with, and because I don't want to think about AoE when this tired), there will probably be at least three flavors:
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[*]"Straight-line" attacks which would normally animate for a short enough time (at least for the 'firing' part') that they couldn't be "dragged" into clipping the world when the target moved.
[*]"Projectile" attacks which would have the "homing" behavior described, because they basically have to. The trick with these is arranging for that fact to be a virtue rather than a drawback, in the presentation.
[*]Non-LOS powers (do not require line of sight to fire). They weren't terribly common, but a few of these did exist, and their animation sets basically require that it "look good" both when they do, and do not, have LOS to the target.
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[*]There may be a fourth or even a fifth sort of ranged attack, it is much too early to have any real idea if we'll need to, and there are at least two alternative mechanics for cases when stuff is "pulled" so that it hits a part of the world that I can think of just off the top of my head, but one of the goals is that while the ice blast *might* be able to go around a corner, depending on the relative positions of the attacker and target, the wall, and the speeds of movement involved (yes, Virginia, there *is* a physics engine) it generally should not be able to *pass through* a wall to hit someone. Unless, of course, there is a reason that it is *supposed* to do so...
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