MrSmileyFaceDude said:
Boy, all these solutions you guys have for keeping to hit. You should come work for us!
Flip that the other way around instead. It is us whom you should be working for.
While I'm a true believer in "keeping it simple", there's a line you can cross where you go so simple that instead of being simple, it's absurd. One of the aspects of simplicity it is makes sense without little thought. It's obvious as to how it's supposed to work. Putting axes in a blunt weapons skill, for example, isn't simplifying it. Axes are not "blunt". It instead confuses the end user and thus actually
reduces simplicity.
I'm not sure what the point of that little tirade was, but there you go. To the topic on hand, I would rather have my opponent dodge and block rather than me always miss. I think some balance between the three is better than one over the other. Sometimes you would miss, sometimes you might've hit but for your opponents last minute step to the side, on others your opponent deftly blocks your swing. The result should be a much more natural fight as it's not reasonable to think that you'll always hit the guy standing in front of you with your sword all the time, or that you'll always miss either.
As for missing in Morrowind, I'm pretty sure I always hit... or was that because I'd passed the Uber status of level 13?
As for animations, don't they use bone structure in the models already or am I too far ahead of the times? I thought by now manipulating models was just a matter of merging bone movements into each other. IE: You have a movement with current bone position. Those bones can only move in a certain way. You have a final position those bones now need to be in. Your program determines the path from the current position to the end position and moves the bones naturally without moving them beyond their ability (no backwards bending elbows for example). That way, you can stop movements mid-motion and from that position, move them towards another end-position such as a strike or block. Of course, if you've blown all your development time on the pretty graphics and Patrick Stewart instead of those nifty small things that really make a difference, then I guess doing that would be too hard.
Twinfalls said:
We've just had a professional games combat programmer explain why dodging animations are difficult in the context of to-hit rolls. Chefe you can keep verbalising 'but you can do this animation' comments here, but I'll take the word of the coder.
These are the same guys that say
Mounted Combat is too hard to do though. Speaking of which, Mount and Blade seems to be quite capable of stopping animations mid swing and performing other actions such as a block, or even putting a weapon away. If you study it closely, the changing weapon is a bit odd but it all happens so smoothly that it's rather nice.