As a shaman i use a spear or hammer or staff. Depending on the weapon i have, it either has the "stabby" (many 1H spears and some 2h spears mostly) animation, the "swing" (many hammers and swords) animation, the (worst ones) "two-handed downward slice/slam" (mostly used for 2h staff and some spears) or the "martial-artist spin-o-rama" animation. Quite often, the weapon i want to use doesn't have the amination i want to use. For example, the current spear i have uses the (usually) staff animation, instead of the cool "stabby" animation that many spears use. Instead of asking for the single item to be changed, I think it would be very cool if we had an option to choose our wield styles similar to the way we choose whether cloak/ranged/melee weapons are shown. the available styles would be based on weapon type - so all spears would have stab or swing choices, all staffs would have the martial artist option and the swing option, etc. To be clear - no asking for the animations themselves to be changed or new animations to be created. Just allows us to pick which of the existing in-game weapon animations we use.
That would be part of it, yes. Vice versa as well.. and i believe that the "martial artist" style is a combination of one and two hands.. but i don't remember off-hand. ATM, I just want to stab things with my awesome-looking spear. But i definitely see people wanting to twirl their staff around too... I mean, the animations are already there, would be a nice way to give people additional customization... oh hey.. actually.. maybe instead of a dropdown, this can be done same way that particle effects are added with reforging, where you add an additional animation to the weapon!
Sorry mind went bad locations. Anyway there is some overhead to what you propose from an animation standpoint. All character skeletons/rigs have the capacity to use the "behind the back-staff" Martial Artist animation as well as the Monks spread-hands stance for his punching. However not all weapons have the sockets or grasp points to use these animations. The weapons would have to be edited by the art team to even allow most of them to use the Martial Artists animations. From there the mechanics team would have to then code and add in a function to change wield style. It is a good idea but unfortunately not as easy as "the animations are already there just switch them" though that certainly would be nice if it worked like that.
Right, that is why i suggested this only be done by weapon type. For example, pretty much every Staff is built about the same way (i think), so it wouldn't (i think) require any additional animating. Versus a 1-h dagger or a 2h hammer, which i guess would require a whole lot of work to make twirl. That's why: If weapon = staff, then choices = twirl OR stab OR slash if weapon = spear, then chocies = stab OR slash etc, etc. etc. I don't want to create a whole ton of additional work, just re-purpose what's already there and easy to adopt. I keep thinking back to my own spear.. it's a 2-hander (with terrible smash-down animation), but it's exactly the same in shape and size as other 2-H spears that have the nice "1 handed forward stab" animation. I have about 30-50 different appearance weapons, so i also see many other situations where this would be applicable.
All depends on how Sony built the staffs to begin with. I do Modeling/Rigging/Texture/Animating as a generalist soon to be Free-lance Artist. So the amount of work would depend entirely upon how Sony originally made the models. I have to go now can't say more.
Estred is right. The weapon dictates the animation stance and the bones in the weapons have a slightly different set up per stance. The staff weapon will be drawn from over the head and the bo staff monk weapon is drawn from below the arm. So the attachment bones are set up in different places on the weapons. So to switch a weapon between stances we have to put in a new rig then set up a new vdl that has the stance info in it. Would be great if we could let a player change stances based on there fighting style, but the set up does not allow that to work. Dave
If I may ask what is a VDL? As I said I am soon to be a freelance artist with a bachelors in Game Art and Design. Any information on possibly file types I would have to know about could greatly help me out.
