IDK if this is possible, but I guess it is, since there are mods who add and modify animations to warband. Perhaps we need an expert in the field to do it well? Anyone know anyone or anything about animating for warband?
1h Stab.
Good that it was buffed from almost uselessness, but right now it has become a long range, highly damaging near-insta attack. I guess it is "balanced" to 2h and pole broken animations, but this doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass. It's a tad too fast, imo.
2h stab.
What is there to say? IMO main problem is the duration of the attack that makes it abusable. You have to block down for a very long time to be sure not to get hit.
Insta-pole swing.
This is just as serious problem as the above if not more. You have very long, very high damage weapons like the glaive and GLA. It seems to me that if the ping difference is high enough, or the other player has his technique down, you cannot see the swing release until you are hit.
Other solutions to the problem that circumvent animation-fixing:
*Slow down the poles and 2h across the board. Especially the long ones.
*Nerf 1h stab damage
*Nerf 2h stab damage.
But having non-glitchy animations would really solve it the best way.
You're oversimplifying the issue Thomek.
Lets see if I can paint a picture of how thrusts work and what exactly is contributing to the weirdness that are thrusts in Warband. Oh, and I'm sorry beforehand for not being able to simplify the reading, it's just the nature of the beast and is necessary to fully understanding the situation we find ourselves in.
To start, lets cover some basics, if you fancy yourself a more knowledged person, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs. First, every attack animation is broken down to three shorter animations, each with its own unique properties. When you click your left mouse button to attack, you're put into an attack's ready animation that has a base duration of .35 seconds(before being affected by wpf), once you release your left mouse button you enter the release animation. The base duration of the release animation varies from weapon to weapon and from attack type to attack type, I believe the 1h thrust is .62 seconds and polearms are .6 seconds. For the 2h release, I'm unsure as to what the
current duration is, as I know it has changed in the past. Immediately upon entering the release animation, your weapon becomes collidable, meaning it can get stuck on walls or damage players.
To elaborate on how this works, here's a bit of information. Every weapon is essentially a
straight bar that originates and extends out from the same position and orientation in the hands that weapons have, its length is solely decided by the weapon length stat. People complain about overswing/thrust hitboxes, but this is why those complaints are weird to understand technically, as being anything other than the product of
lag. Only players have "hitboxes"(capsules really,
here's what they look like), to clear up a common misunderstanding. To land a hit, you simply need to have the weapon collision bar intersect any part of a player hit capsule. It's a really simple system, but that's what makes it so great.
Now that you understand what it is that allows one player to
hit another, lets look at how you can actually
damage them. Since damage is so complicated, I'm going to skip the parts that I think most people already know and since Thomek focused on thrusts, which also happen to be the easiest to explain, I'm only going to talk about those.
Ignoring the more intuitive and widely known portions of the damage formula, there are two things I think that are really worth mentioning when talking about thrust damage. First of course are sweetspots, but the quieter, more covert, and sometimes grossly underestimated yet equally as devilish mechanic, is speed bonus. I'll explain speed bonus first since it's technically more simplistic.
Again, still focusing solely on thrusts, your speed bonus is found by looking at two player's(the attacker and the guy getting hit) speed relative to each other, along the x, z world plane(height seems to be ignored). Without getting technical, I'll just say that the level of damage gains due to the high ceiling, is massive. A really good speed bonus(two players running towards each other on flat terrain) could amount to a 40-50% increase in raw damage! I'd wager that the average speed bonus on thrusts is probably more like a 20% bonus in raw damage, and higher for certain weapons(awlpike), due to the way players fight with and against them. This is huge, we're talking
several points in power strike, huge.
Switching to thrust sweetspots, we'll begin to see why it's so hard to find a happy medium between early hitting thrusts, and late hanging thrusts.
The most important thing to keep in mind about thrust sweetspots, is that it is found solely by looking at
when in the release animation a weapon's collision bar intersects a hit capsule. "When" is defined by how far a player has progressed through the entirety of the release animation. So if your weapon's collision bar intersects a hit capsule on frame 10 of a 20 frame long release animation, you hit at 50% through the total animation length.
Thrust sweetspots are broken up into five sections. Progressing in order from the start of the animation to the finish we have the lower-outer, lower-inner, the part we generally refer to as the actual "sweetspot", an upper-inner, and an upper-outer section. The outer sections deal zero damage, while the "sweetspot" deals 100% damage. The inner sections of the sweetspot range from 100% to 0% raw damage depending upon where you hit. This is an image cmp posted explaining the different sections of the thrust sweetspots.
visitors can't see pics , please
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logincmp has several great posts explaining sweetspots, and not just for thrusts, in
this thread
Now that I've explained
how things work, you might have noticed some problems with the system. Most importantly, that sweetspots are decided by progression relative to the whole duration. And the "whole duration" varies significantly due to differences in weapon speeds and to a lesser extent, wpf as well. Some slower weapons are able to allow a player to slowly turn their thrusts into player more than others because the weapon stats have
coincidentally given a weapon a high turn speed:weapon speed ratio. But keep in mind, a high turn speed:weapon speed ratio results in not being able to hit an opponent as early with a high damaging thrust(it's a slower weapon, thus the total animation's duration is increased, this results in needing more time to reach the 35% progression allowing a player to deal 100% damage).
To get back to the individual animations themselves, we need to focus again on the simplicity of the weapon collision bars and player hit capsules. Because the system is so simple, damage doesn't have any direct relation to what actually happens in the animation itself. What your character's arm is doing, in no way affects the amount of damage you can deal. We could change the animation so it only has 1 frame for the entire ~.6 second duration and thrusts would be every bit as damaging as they are now.
The way I see it, there is only one reason(but two perspectives) you should ever consider
editing an animation. This is to make sure it's intuitive to use and understand. It's one of only 4 basic attack directions in the game, it
has to be intuitive. I recently edited the 1h thrust(with a very minor adjustment to the polearm animation) specifically because proper use of the animation was unintuitive and required prior knowledge as to what the appropriate method of use was(turning into your swing as a means to delay
when you hit. Remember, sweetspots are separate from what happens during an animation, damage is found by progression through the total duration). The second part of this, is to make the visuals represent more closely what players can expect from damage.
I believe, with the exception of the polearm thrust, where the arms appear to extend forward slower, but for a longer period of time(thus slightly harder to distinguish sweetspot locations visually), we are already where we need to be. The problem, is that due to previously mentioned mechanics, there exists large variation in damage outcomes as well as practical uses, which are generally referred to under a single term(concept).
My conclusion? Abandon ship and start from scratch. My opinion is that sweetspots and thrust durations probably shouldn't be so easily affected as they are by such things as weapon speed and weapon proficiency. Speed bonus shouldn't vary as drastically as it does. That is, damage modifiers from speed should probably be cut in half. Don't have some thrusts originate near head level while others below the waist, as long as the head remains as
the target hit capsule for maximizing damage.
I'm sure there's more I could add, but at this point I'm rather exhausted from writing and I doubt many people will actually read this as is.
