desviper wrote:

And please have a wrist cannon powerset

I thought they were going to do their best to make "power customization" a priority so that animations for powersets aren't baked-in to specific powers.

Basically what I'm saying is that instead of a dedicated "wrist cannon" powerset I think we're going to have the option to have ranged powers that we can have emnate from our hands/wrists and then have the option to wear whatever gloves/bracers we want. Hopefully that means we can make those "ranged powers" look like (for example) gun-blasts and come from gloves/bracers that look like gun barrels or the like.

Obviously the key for this to work will be to have as many customization options as possible.

Jorortis wrote:

The only REAL problem I had with Coh and co was with my civilian costume , sometimes I like for my medieval one handed axe to turn into something more realistic when i am a civilian.

When weapon customization rolled around, maces could be bats, wrenches, clubs and such.

What bugged me was that the same sound effects were used. My bat made a scratching noise a spiked mace made rather then the thud of a bat. And such issues I hope CoT solves.

Battle Axe was another set.

There's another one for CoT, Axes. Maybe one set "Battle Axe" or three sets, "light axe", which is more like the CoH version with one-handed attacks; "Heavy Axe", a two-handed version maybe with slower recharge time and higher damage; and "Twin Axes", two light axes (this could maybe simply be part of the duel swords/weapons set).

On the note of scythe, how about Kamas and Kamas with chains.

Maybe scythe could be in the (bladed) staff category, and Kamas in the twin sword/weapon.

Also, I do hope there's the option of having each attack have a separate weapon. Take assault rifle for example, it'd be nice to have a weapon master toon that pulls out a flamethrower for the flamethrower attack(s), sniper rifle for that, minigun for full auto, a shotgun for buckshot and beanbag, and a grenade launcher for M30s.

It'd also be nice for any Splashes to all have different weapons.

syntaxerror37 wrote:

desviper wrote:
Also, I do hope there's the option of having each attack have a separate weapon. Take assault rifle for example, it'd be nice to have a weapon master toon that pulls out a flamethrower for the flamethrower attack(s), sniper rifle for that, minigun for full auto, a shotgun for buckshot and beanbag, and a grenade launcher for M30s.

Does each gun type just pop into my hand as a cycle through my powers? Or do I go through the draw animation each time as I cycle? Honestly both options are lacking to me.
This would really depend on how re-draw is handled. Now, I know there were many CoXers who would not play a "weapon" character because of how re-draw was handled. There is certainly room for improvement, such as not putting away your gun or sword because you want to use a kick for instance.

I'd have to think the differences between the graphics engine used in CoH (which was probably approaching 10+ years old by the time CoH was shutdown) and UE4 will be significant with respect to how things like weapon-redraw will be handled. Until we know for sure I'd suspect there will be noticeable improvements for this kind of thing in CoT.

syntaxerror37 wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I'd have to think the differences between the graphics engine used in CoH (which was probably approaching 10+ years old by the time CoH was shutdown) and UE4 will be significant with respect to how things like weapon-redraw will be handled. Until we know for sure I'd suspect there will be noticeable improvements for this kind of thing in CoT.

I think it is more than just the capabilities of the graphics engine. For instance in CoH, if you used Brawl when the AR was drawn you would just swing with your off hand. if you used Boxing from the fighting pool, which was the same animation as Brawl, the AR would poof and you'd have to re-drawl. Clearly the engine could handle me throwing a punch while holding my rifle in the other hand.

The weapon redraw issues in CoH had to do with either poor power coordinations and/or animation limitations which might have at least indirectly had something to do with graphics engine limitations that wouldn't allow them to easily "fix" long standing issues like that. Remember there were plenty of obvious bugs that the CoH Devs knew about for years but still couldn't fix because of the ancient "rats nest" coding that made tinkering with certain things almost impossible for them.

At any rate I'd agree CoT has the opportunity to make this better and for what it’s worth the clean, new graphics engine should not be useable as an "excuse" for these problems to continue.

Foradain wrote:

I'd like to suggest an animation set (possibly several, so it may be well after launch before they all got done, if adopted) where people using weapons for their ranged attacks use those weapons for their melee attacks. Someone wielding dual pistols strikes someone with the butt of one or both of the pistols. Someone using a rifle uses bayonet moves (buttstroke, jab, etc.) Someone with a fancy bow might not want to use it as a melee weapon, they could punch with their free hand or maybe jab with an arrow. A witch using a staff to cast ranged spells might fall back on her bo training...
This would be very good for the Assault class/specs if/when they get released.

This is an interesting idea. I could see how you could give any kind of "hand held item" both a ranged animation component and a melee animation component. This would let people have full freedom to use items in what might be considered "non-traditional" ways. For example most of the time people would use a pistol as a ranged weapon but the melee option would let it be used to pistol-whip someone. Conversely most people use a sword as strictly a melee weapon but the ranged option would let people throw one (like the Jedi/Sith sometimes do in the Star Wars movies).

The real problem with this wouldn't be the animations but how you'd construct the power to work like that. They might have to have like a manual "secondary attack option" that would let a player choose which way they wanted to use the item (melee or ranged). Things like this could get pretty complicated depending on how much freedom they wanted to allow.

Lothic wrote:

syntaxerror37 wrote:
Lothic wrote:
I'd have to think the differences between the graphics engine used in CoH (which was probably approaching 10+ years old by the time CoH was shutdown) and UE4 will be significant with respect to how things like weapon-redraw will be handled. Until we know for sure I'd suspect there will be noticeable improvements for this kind of thing in CoT.

I think it is more than just the capabilities of the graphics engine. For instance in CoH, if you used Brawl when the AR was drawn you would just swing with your off hand. if you used Boxing from the fighting pool, which was the same animation as Brawl, the AR would poof and you'd have to re-drawl. Clearly the engine could handle me throwing a punch while holding my rifle in the other hand.

The weapon redraw issues in CoH had to do with either poor power coordinations and/or animation limitations which might have at least indirectly had something to do with graphics engine limitations that wouldn't allow them to easily "fix" long standing issues like that. Remember there were plenty of obvious bugs that the CoH Devs knew about for years but still couldn't fix because of the ancient "rats nest" coding that made tinkering with certain things almost impossible for them.
At any rate I'd agree CoT has the opportunity to make this better and for what it’s worth the clean, new graphics engine should not be useable as an "excuse" for these problems to continue.

As far as a weaponmaster multi-gun person, there could be two [three] answers I can think of off the top of my head, these also respond to other redraw instances:
1: *deal with it* you took an RP role of someone who actually does have to go through the work of drawing many weapons (or just two, AR and sniper or whatever still) and can suffer the actual redraw penalty of it.
2: This one is a bit more work on the animation team, but having the draw+attack animation equal the same time as the attack animation (i.e., quicken the attack part). This equalizes the draw effect.
[3: have him hold all weapons at the same time, this is a bit silly, but it's not super insane to have a hero hold an AR in one hand and a sniper/shotgun in the other (with a wrist flamethrower or whatever)]

As far as weapon + animations, and this is WAY more work on the animation team, you could tailor all melee (and other) attacks to have an appropriate or even cool weapon + alternative, consider the following:
> I'm a Partisan or sentinel ( Corr or Defend) (or Master) with AR and a non-weapon support (say empathy), but I also have some splashes of fire melee in there. My fire punch could be tailored to a fiery rifle butt, a fire sword could be a fiery bayonet. As for Empathy, It could clumsily (or smoothly) be cast with my weapon out, or even come out of my weapon (healing from the gun, what a symbol)
>I'm a Gladiator or Bulwark (Scarp or Tank), I have a sword and ice armour, but I also have some Ice ranged and melee. The ice ranged could come out of my sword and an other melee could become part of the sword.
>Back to Partisan or Sentinel (maybe Director and Master too): I have Archery and whatever else, the whatever could be special arrows (e.g. ice hold arrows, melt armour arrows, blinding light arrows, etc.)

Note: I still promote a "Trick Arrows" powerset, it's a great compliment to archery.

I paid for Fashionista, which, due to the accumulation of different perks below it, entitles me to (I believe) three "signature weapon/object" thingies ("Lethal Weapon" and "Double Trouble" are both below Fashionista, and Fashionista itself has one in it). If you go back and reread the Kickstarter comments (and you don't have to) I talked about making one of my perk items a pair of, wait for it...

wrist blasters

They said it would count as one item assuming the left hand's thing is a mirror image of the right's.

I was thinking of them being more like bracers than wristwatches, in other words, not strictly just on the bend of the wrist, like the Nega Bands, but more of a Space Ghost type thing that takes up a larger part of the forearm.

Also, if there isn't at least one jetpack option available from the get-go, I'm making them do that if I can, because WOW did they make us wait WAY too long for jetpacks in CoH. The Sky Raiders had two different types of back-mounted packs on day 1, but we couldn't truly have jetpacks as costume pieces until the Mecha Armor sets came out (I'm not counting the tech wings, because those were wings, not the same thing, and the rocket boots, though nice, were also not the same thing).

I want an anchor skin for a two handed weapon animation.

I mentioned this in the costumes thread, but I'd like to see umbrellas and parasols usable as emitters for attacks, buffs, or whatever.
[IMG]http://i555.photobucket.com/albums/jj477/fuzzygnome01/ParasolBlast_zps64af08da.jpg[/IMG]

Also, sword canes where your pawn actually pulls the sword out of the cane when entering combat.

[wikipedia]List of premodern combat weapons[/wikipedia]

I especially request realistic warhammers, polearms and spears/javelins.

With the weapon "powersets", keep Aesthetic Decoupling in mind. The Devs plan to allow powers to have many points of origin. For example, a magic bolt may exit a hand, forehead, shoulder, gun, sword, nunchuck, knee, eye, etc, etc. "Fire Sword" and "Fire Melee" needn't be different. Apparently "Fire Blast", "Electric Blast", "Earthen Blast", and "Wind Blast" (and more) may be cleverly combined into one set: Burning Blast for example.

And this is brilliant, because it makes far fewer "sets" for the Devs to create and assemble, but allows, on the face of it, the players to have many "sets" to choose from.

I presume we will choose animations for each power set, although it would certainly be cool if a tertiary power set could match the animation of the primary or secondary power set. That would help considerably with staying true to concept. I did love me some laser eye beams, but they were certainly an odd duck on my dark melee scrapper.

Has anyone suggested music instruments as weapons?

Gatling pistols. Preferably with a tri-barrel option. If you can tell that it uses an open cylinder like a Dardick, so much the better. ^_^

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Has anyone suggested music instruments as weapons?

You mean ... AXE melee?

[img]http://assets.fender.com/frl/32dc7c5c28af246319609145e44ff66c/generated/51393c8a008e4b2a8e1625df7126bded.png[/img]

Redlynne wrote:

TheMightyPaladin wrote:
Has anyone suggested music instruments as weapons?

You mean ... AXE melee?

NEED!

Dont Need!

WANT! ;D

[img]http://i.imgur.com/1zXQ0Nc.png[/img]

I know I've said this before but Nunchaku, Nunchaku Nunchaku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaPyXg3eNe8

These two are a bit of a stretch, but I always wanted to see bladed tonfas and flails.

Tonfas would require a new animation to hold them, and chain animations are a pain.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

One for each power in the set. and a few for carrying it around.

Um ... it's a LOT MORE than that ...

[IMG]http://i59.tinypic.com/w9ilg3.jpg[/IMG]

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

so what else? I'm really asking because I totally don't know

1 animation for every power in a set with left handed based single handed use.
1 animation for every power in a set with right handed based single handed use.
1 animation for every power in a set with 1 nunchaku passing between both hands.
1 animation for every power in a set for dual wielding nunchaku.
Idle animations for each.
Carrying animations for each type of movement power.
Combat animations for attack powers used with movement powers.
Animations for putting away, retrieval of weapon from location.
Also part of every animation - the hit effects on target.

To cut down on resource expense, going with single handed use, with only one side (let's just say right handed use only for example purposes here), setting aside left-handed, both hands, and dual wielding animations. There are still a lot more animations than just 1 for every single power.

And if we really want to be fancy, instead of just going with the "free style" of use (which has little in the way of actual usefulness in fighting, it sure looks cool), actually applying the multiple fighting styles of which there are 3 main branches to pull from for inspiration. Much in the same way players have requested various forms of fighting styles for powers / animations already, if we were to invest time into creating fighting style animation suites for hand-to-hand, it would be remiss of us to not do so for weapon styles as well. And this is in no way a promise of anything to come.

Now creating the actual animations becomes even a bit trickier. The chain has to be animated in a way that it doesn't look silly like passing through itself on a regular basis. A tricky bit will be making sure the handles don't pass through the avatar so animations can be done like the shoulder slap or waist slap (for the recoil off the body if some correct animations were to be applied), but also any clothing, tails, wings, etc...The easy thing to do is to have the handles check for collision which is an easy thing to set up, but then when the animations would play out against a target, the collision would be detected which could end up with some not so complete animations as a result (really tough to say as this would need to be tested in multiple scenarios) - due to the fact that the entire structure isn't solid but has the dang chain / rope / cord that could end up doing funny things with collision detection on the handles. Not using collision detection will result in some clipping and may be unavoidable.

This is not to say its not going to happen either. The engine provides a lot of possibilities natively, including using meshes for chains and ropes, collision detection being optional, animation blending and more. But weapons like whips, nunchaku, and three-section-staff do impart a particular complexity to their design.

Tannim222 wrote:

This is not to say its not going to happen either. The engine provides a lot of possibilities natively, including using meshes for chains and ropes, collision detection being optional, animation blending and more. But weapons like whips, nunchaku, and three-section-staff do impart a particular complexity to their design.

I can't hardly imagine a more difficult class of hand-held weapons to animate in a game like this than things like nunchaku or a three-section staff. The combination of the chain sections plus the movements of the staff-parts in both hands and around the body as well as around objects that could be struck is hard enough to quantify just as a mental exercise much less capture in software. By comparison I would think things like whips would be a tiny bit easier just because you could let the free end move around semi-randomly without having to worry about it being anchored to the character's hand.

I'm not suprised these things didn't exist in CoH and it would be amazing to see if they can eventually pull it off in CoT.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Well thanks for putting as much thought into it as you already have
I hope it eventually comes to something
Mind you for me personally I wouldn't mind a bit if the animations weren't absolutely perfect
Remember most of us are used to seeing nunchaku in movies (where they don't really hit their targets) or spinning them in the air without hitting anything
so it won't bother us a bit if they don't recoil realistically but just swing through.
Heck I played around with nunchucks for years and my friends thought I was pretty good, before I ever got around to actually trying to hit anything substantial enough to cause recoil.
(Most of the time I didn't have anything I'd be allowed to hit)
The first time I did it, they bounced back right on my fingers. Hurt like heck.
After that I figured out that when you hit a hard target you need to pull back right away, you can't swing through.
In COH swords, axes and maces (and unarmed attacks as well) just swung right through to complete their animation just as if there was no target interrupting the blow and I don't remember anyone complaining.
and Maxi's nunchaku (in Soulcalibur) don't recoil naturally, and he's freekin awesome.
Finally remember: "The best is the enemy of the good"
I'd much rather have nunchaku that aren't perfect than not have them because they can't be perfect

For what it's worth I wasn't even talking about making the animations for weapons like these be "perfect". I was just talking about the relative difficulty of making even passable animations work. I'm sorry but I didn't create this difficulty - it would be obvious to anyone attempting to implement melee weapons like these in a MMO game that some of them would be harder to make than others.

For your sake I hope they can make these things available in CoT. I'm just pointing out the relative difficulty of what you're asking for - if they were easy to do CoH would have had them years ago.

I'm still reminded of the Player Summit where David was taking suggestions from the crowd for ideas of what to put into a Post-Apoc costume set. Everyone else wanted clothes! Then I stepped up the mic and said what we needed were WEAPONS! So I started reeling off names of found and scrounged improvised weapons. Naturally I included a "chainsaw" in my list, which David then drew with great gusto (and puffs of smoke coming out of it to show that it was running!).

And then I heard a girl's voice from the other side of the room somewhere speak up and say ... "Make it drip!"

I don't think she was wanting to see the fluid dynamics of motor oil under the influence of a gravity field ...

I know this is asking a lot, but when it comes to swords, I'd just hope/pray/beg that there might (some day?) be different animations available for different types of blade. A rapier isn't used the same way as a broadsword or a cavalry saber or a katana. Please?

I would like to see two-handed weapons, especially ones that aren't super slow. If I have a character that is strong enough to lift a mac truck and throw it, there should be no reason why I can't swing a two handed weapon without it looking like I'm trying to swing it underwater.

Oh and shields, I want to shield bash some baddies.

We don't have stats but we do have powers

I guess the closer the game gets to release/testing we'll see how the powers/attacks animations play out. Of course for all I know the devs and designers will make so that you can use one weapon but have an animation of the character using it in two-hands, which would be awesome.

To the point on two-handed weapons and strength I was coming at from a character concept of someone having super strength and using a weapon over just punching.

There were lots of examples out there. Magik of the X-Men comes to mind, but the CoH devs and some of the playerbase were just stupid when it came to the idea that Titan Weapons had to seem impossible to swing or use.

Doctor Tyche wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Cavalier wrote:
I would like to see two-handed weapons, especially ones that aren't super slow. If I have a character that is strong enough to lift a mac truck and throw it, there should be no reason why I can't swing a two handed weapon without it looking like I'm trying to swing it underwater.
Oh and shields, I want to shield bash some baddies.

Agreed! While Titan Weapons had a unique feature, I hated how they made it seem you had to be slow at first.
Then when suggestions on how to fix it (port weapon skins to Katana) where said they were against it, because the idea of fast huge buster sword didn't work for them. o.O What if it just showed my Katana user was super strong!

Inuyasha comes to mind.

Bleach = GETSUGA TENSHO

Pffft...Gypsy Danger in Pacific Rim!

Nuttal and Brady's [url=http://www.footloosecomic.com/]Footloose[/url] webcomic postulates a martial art based on Indiscriminate Whacking With Oversized Weaponry. ^_^

[img]http://alfa.gifs-planet.com/new2/2409.gif[/img]

But...OIL TANKER!