Given the sheer number of Lethal Weapons, Double Troubles, and Fashionistas on the Kickstarter, the amount of jet packs, wings, laser guns, that they make just for that should cover almost all of the weapons, backpacks, wings, etc people would want.

I personally am hoping for Wrist Blasters, a Jet Pack, and something else not sure what yet.

Halae wrote:

I'm really hoping that among the tail options there's long, thick tails. In CoH, there were no tails that were of any sort of decent size; sure, they looked decent, but... sometimes you just want something thick and long.
Don't take that out of context :I
For example, here's a 4e tiefling, with a good showing of his tail. I constantly wanted something like this and never got it. I get that it can be hard to animate things like these, but the game Neverwinter found a workable solution, I figure a group as good as this with access to the Unreal 4 engine could as well, and it'd open up additionals for a lot of interesting concepts. I already have some in mind.

You mean something like [url=https://goo.gl/photos/cETCztjxFb9Mcg9W9]this[/url], or even [url=https://goo.gl/photos/yJXPnoZfFU3XhSzy5]this[/url]?

I think that CO got it pretty much spot on when they introduced sliders to tail length and thickness, so I wouldn't expect anything less from CoT. For reference, the two up there are middle and max respectively on the thickness slider, with minimum [url=https://goo.gl/photos/JsiuAdJDtf9AJ9Mv6]here[/url] for lizard tail.

MikaMerrow wrote:

Foradain wrote:
The centaur and the naga are not likely to be available at launch (Devs: Please surprise me on this one ^_^), but may be available later. CO has digitigrade feet, but they aren't animated well IMHO. Butterfly or Pixie wings I have high confidence in, as they seem to me to be a stepping stone to Firefairy's wings.
They have -always- been "left out for later," and never come. One thing I am tired of is mythicals being left out in the dirt in ANY MMO. I say, do it.

The hard truth is that it gets "left out for later" because it is a very hard problem to solve, unless you just want your character to be a sprite that has little interaction with the actions his powers take on. It is something that we'd love to get working, but it will NOT be in the initial release, and we cannot make promises about it. At a minimum, such inhuman frames require entirely unique sets of animations for every single power that uses the replaced humanoid bodyparts.

Just imagine a "martial arts" power set's animations. Just one power set. Picture, say, Jet Li or Keanu Reeves fighting. Now swap the two of them for each other. Now swap in Xena in their places. Sure, Xena may not fight like that in the show, but you can picture her doing exactly the same moves. Now put a centaur in their place. Would a centaur really look right flipping about that way? Kicking like that? Using his forelegs only (as a simple approximation), with his rump clipping through the floor and surroundings as it whips about, or with it being left stationary and detached (or attached like a slinky dog-backside)?

No. you'd have to make up and implement an entire new set of animations for each power in such a set in order to make a centauroid look right using it. That's a lot of time and creativity, and that's one power set. Multiply this by all the power sets that are more than "hold up a hand and magic happens" type effects. Consider flight animations, and dodge animations, and athletic animations.

Fantasy body-types are not critical to the "superhero/supervillain" story archetype. Therefore, delaying the entire game still longer to ensure that those body types were fully functional with all animations would be irresponsible. So we can't make promises. Now, I'm not on the art or powers or program-the-animations teams, so I cannot speak for them. But these are the issues as I understand them, and why I suspect so many MMOs have never gotten around to the options.

Exactly Radiac. The hard truth is we could make an alternate animation for 90 percent of the game usable by 100 percent of the players for the same or less effort as implementing centaurs for, gosh - two percent of the playerbase? That's hard to justify.

MikaMerrow wrote:

Hey if they can make Kung-fu pandas in WoW to satisfy a small base they can surely put in centaurs or lamia. Considering the massive fanbase Monster Musume has in the states, putting monster PCs would likely bring in a LOT more players.

Pandaren were already a well established part of the Warcraft lore way before their inclusion in WoW, and I'm sure they didn't need to build them completely from scratch since they are still a humanoid. Besides it wasn't just Pandaren that were added.

Personally I am really really hoping that CoT will have many non-humanoid body options like non-legged, four-legged, six-legged, eight-legged (both taur/lamia form and normal animal form), properly implemented support for four arms and so on but I just don't see it as realistic to even think of them until several years after launch, primarily due to the huge amount of work in making them (which I admit increases the longer they wait) and the increased amount of work in making some new aesthetic power options afterwards. The hard reality is that almost all of the time it just isn't financially viable.

I fully admit that now next to nothing about Monster Musume but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't "translate" that easily between the two "worlds".

blacke4dawn wrote:

Personally I am really really hoping that CoT will have many non-humanoid body options like non-legged, four-legged, six-legged, eight-legged (both taur/lamia form and normal animal form), properly implemented support for four arms and so on but I just don't see it as realistic to even think of them until several years after launch, primarily due to the huge amount of work in making them (which I admit increases the longer they wait) and the increased amount of work in making some new aesthetic power options afterwards. The hard reality is that almost all of the time it just isn't financially viable.

The truth is that it doesn't actually get harder the longer we wait. Each time we add a new one, there will be more work involved in all future additions to the game as they must now accommodate all the limb-arrangements available.

It makes little difference whether "naga-body" is added before or after the "Capoeira" power set (no promises on either; I'm just making up examples off the top of my head); if it's added first, then Capoeira now needs to have a whole extra set of animations developed for its powers. If it's added after, "naga-body" has to be able to accommodate every extant power set, including Capoeira, which requires new animations.

If you have naga, centaur, arachtaur, merfolk, and "Ursela from the little mermaid" as body types, that's 6 (including the original biped form) animations you have to make for every power in every new power suite.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Segev wrote:
Does this "monster musume" (which I believe translates as "monster girl") take place in a fantasy setting, or a modern-day city? (If it's a modern-day city, my bet would be that it's not exactly super-powered comics so much as "high school dating sim," just knowing Japan's proclivities when it comes to such genres.)
From looking at a few images of it, and if I know my classifications right, it looks to be more of the harem type.

Yeah, that is not the genre of CoT. While I won't tell people they're not allowed to design things from/for that genre in the game, it won't be directly nor deliberately supported, certainly not at the expense of other more super-powered-comics-flavored development items.

Which is only to say, here, that even if it is popular enough to bring in players, it is unlikely that players drawn in expecting a harem anime game would want to stick around when they realized that that's not what CoT was.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Pretty much what I said, though I may have expressed myself poorly.
The longer one waits to implement other body types the more animations you will have to port/adapt for the new body type. That is what I meant by "increases the longer you wait" since at least I expect all existing animation choices (as far as applicable) to be available when other body types launch, not that it gets harder. Even something as "simple" as harpies (exchanging arms for wings) will require a fairly large amount of work in regards to animations since you would have to adapt or even replace every animation that "uses" the arms.

Yeah. I was more trying to express that the sooner we do it, the harder it is to make additional power sets. So the problem exists either way. Make harpies late, and the umpteen power suites for which they need new animations developed makes developing harpies harder. Make harpies early, and sure, you only have to make 5 unique animations for them...but now each time you add a new power, you need a biped animation and a harpy animation, doubling your work on animating the powers. Add merfolk, and you've tripled it.

So it's a compounding problem either way.

Regarding quadrupeds, Radiac, I'm willing to be those would likely be reserved for minion or summon type critters, so they probably wouldn't be in the game for a while. Still, looking forward to that.

But yeah, nonhumanoid lower bodies are HARD. Even normal humanoids are hard, but nonhumanoids are much worse from an animating standpoint.

Radiac wrote:

What I'm trying to say is, adding weapons doesn't increase your "Coefficient of motion problems" multiplier the way adding body types does, right?

Correct. you're still working on the same animation skeleton, you're just adding a new piece to it that triggers a particular set of animation changes.

think of the animation rigging as a skeleton. In fact, they're often referred to as skeletons. Now, consider what would be easier - taking off the legs and attaching, say, a snake tail in their place, or simply putting a baseball bat in its hand. That's what we're dealing with here. It's also why digitigrade feet tend to look unfortunate in games like this, as technically they're still working on the plantigrade skeleton.

The animation rig is invisible, the skeleton isn't seen. What we see in game are two other things - mesh (the shape which a piece takes) and Textures (Which are the colors, shinemaps, and skins). So someone with, say, hooves instead of feet? It looks weird because their hooves are going through the same motions normal feet would be taking, since the mesh and textures are merely following the skeleton. but this makes tauric body types such as a naga or centaur INCREDIBLY difficult to work with, much less design clothing and armor for.

EDIT: decided to move the animation and digitigrade rigging idea to a new thread. It deserves its own.

Radiac wrote:

..., your different weapon-based power sets would need an animation for deploying and stowing the weapon,...

you mean.. powersets that are called `Brawling` (knives, boxer, kick boxer, etc..), single or dual `Wielding` (swords, bats, etc..), and so forth. ;)

Fireheart wrote:

Izzy wrote:
Radiac wrote:
..., your different weapon-based power sets would need an animation for deploying and stowing the weapon,...
you mean.. powersets that are called `Brawling` (knives, boxer, kick boxer, etc..), single or dual `Wielding` (swords, bats, etc..), and so forth. ;)
What we players often don't notice, is that there is some sort of 'footwork' involved in all of these 'simple' upper-body animations. If they didn't have foot-work, they'd look ridiculous. Factor in a Centaur-oid body and now you need twice as much foot-work, which requires a whole new set of animations, beyond those that might be portable between bipedal humanoid body-models.
That's completely beyond such issues as pathing and movement, since a quadruped, or a nil-ped snake, requires More Room to get around.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Pretty sure that Radiac's point was that when introducing new weapon types you don't need to go through any existing animations to see if they fit (you might do for convenience sake) and it "leave" an extremely low, if any, permanent increase in amount in work needed to make more animations for weapons in general (though that depends more on where the line is drawn between weapon types) but introducing new playable body types makes it a necessity to go through each and every existing animation that moves the body before you can even make it look passable and it "leaves" a high permanent increase in work for new body animations.

It's just easier to make, for example, a dragon, if you only have to animate that dragon in it's own liar and with it's onw separate set of movements and animations. If you have to make the dragon body able to do everything that a player-controlled body does, that's a lot more work. Not only does the addition of a new body type mean that EVERY animation and movement in the game has to be ported over to "dragon", but every new thing you make after the dragon body is rolled out has to include a version of the new funny walk or dance move or whatever for dragons now.

it's like

(Work you have to do) = (number of body types)x(number of animations that apply to those types)

If you keep the new body types to non-player-controlled NPCs and environment mobs, then the number of animations can be kept low, since the dragon isn't going to have to do the dance emotes, three different types of "Run" animation, etc. It just has to do what a dragon does, which is a lot less stuff.

Segev wrote:

MikaMerrow wrote:
Foradain wrote:
The centaur and the naga are not likely to be available at launch (Devs: Please surprise me on this one ^_^), but may be available later. CO has digitigrade feet, but they aren't animated well IMHO. Butterfly or Pixie wings I have high confidence in, as they seem to me to be a stepping stone to Firefairy's wings.
They have -always- been "left out for later," and never come. One thing I am tired of is mythicals being left out in the dirt in ANY MMO. I say, do it.

The hard truth is that it gets "left out for later" because it is a very hard problem to solve, unless you just want your character to be a sprite that has little interaction with the actions his powers take on. It is something that we'd love to get working, but it will NOT be in the initial release, and we cannot make promises about it. At a minimum, such inhuman frames require entirely unique sets of animations for every single power that uses the replaced humanoid bodyparts.
Just imagine a "martial arts" power set's animations. Just one power set. Picture, say, Jet Li or Keanu Reeves fighting. Now swap the two of them for each other. Now swap in Xena in their places. Sure, Xena may not fight like that in the show, but you can picture her doing exactly the same moves. Now put a centaur in their place. Would a centaur really look right flipping about that way? Kicking like that? Using his forelegs only (as a simple approximation), with his rump clipping through the floor and surroundings as it whips about, or with it being left stationary and detached (or attached like a slinky dog-backside)?
No. you'd have to make up and implement an entire new set of animations for each power in such a set in order to make a centauroid look right using it. That's a lot of time and creativity, and that's one power set. Multiply this by all the power sets that are more than "hold up a hand and magic happens" type effects. Consider flight animations, and dodge animations, and athletic animations.
Fantasy body-types are not critical to the "superhero/supervillain" story archetype. Therefore, delaying the entire game still longer to ensure that those body types were fully functional with all animations would be irresponsible. So we can't make promises. Now, I'm not on the art or powers or program-the-animations teams, so I cannot speak for them. But these are the issues as I understand them, and why I suspect so many MMOs have never gotten around to the options.

Definitely the case for fighting-type moves. But I feel like many sets would work fine for any humanoid torso model. Would a centaur's fire blast be so much harder than a humanoids? So, any non-melee wouldn't be brutal I don't think.

For melee, the hard way could be to mostly keep upper body and give an upper-only alternative to any kicking animation (in CoH, there were hand-only alternates for some Martial Arts moves). The easy way could be to just prohibit martial arts type sets for very non-humanoid bodies.