There’s a thread going over at the Combat: Samurai Island forums about the pros and cons of using an animation override (such as the extremely popular ZHAO and ZHAO-II made by Ziggy Puff) while participating in combat. While other combat systems discuss which AO is the best, C:SI is somewhat different in that, being a melee combat system, animations are an integral part of the combat rather than simply providing ambience and visual appeal to Second Life® itself.
I won’t argue whether or not animation overrides are necessary for Second Life; every person that’s been in SL™ for any significant amount of time has discovered that they are necessary and has most likely spent a fair amount of time carefully picking through the thousands of individual animations and hundreds of available AO sets to find the perfect compilation to fit their avatar. Nobody wants to look like a noob, and the default Second Life® animations are extremely lame.
Having admitted that they are necessary, even highly desirable in general, I still feel compelled to point out that they can cause significant problems with C:SI or any melee combat system.
As Makkiavelli pointed out in the C:SI forum thread linked above, it’s not uncommon for walk and run animations to completely obscure C:SI combat animations. If you run quickly into attack range and then immediately block or slash, it’s possible that the animation override will play the end of the walk or run animation right over the top of the C:SI block or attack animation. In addition, the "hard land" animation - being a comparatively long animation - can completely obscure the fact that you have gone into block after a fall.
It’s also quite possible to abuse animation overriders to allow for cheating, and I know of at least one person who has admitted to doing so in the past I and suspect several others, though it may be unintentional in most cases.
But there is a specific issue related to animation overrides that has annoyed me to the limits of my patience over the last two days, and that’s what I really wanted to post about : In some cases, animation overrides make it impossible to add interesting things to C:SI weapons.
Specifically, I am trying once again to add forward and side rolls to my new sword, and have spent quite some time creating the animations for these moves, only to find out when I test them ‘in world’ that my animation override absolutely destroys the effect.
Here’s a quick little (low-quality, sorry) video of a forward roll that I made as an example:
When not wearing an animation override in-world, I can adjust this move to just about any speed and distance that I like without significant side effects. When I do wear an AO, though, the animation override detects when I am moving at roughly the speed of a run or higher and starts playing a priority 4 run animation right over the top of the forward roll. This looks like absolute crap, going from rolling to running and back several times per second. Frankly, it looks spastic as hell, and is completely unacceptable.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered something like this, unfortunately. The Wave Katana was supposed to have four extra moves when it was first designed, that had to be removed because of conflicts with animation overrides. Most customers would not know the cause of such a conflict and would likely attribute the problems to low product quality, and very few people would be willing to turn off an AO just to have a duel.
I have spent, in terms of accumulated time over the last year, at least a full forty-hour week (with 10 of those hours being spent over the last two days!) trying to find a suitable way around this problem, to no avail.
One possible option would be to create and distribute my own free version of the ZHAO-II (for instance) that would be customized for C:SI combat. Unfortunately, it’s hard enough to set up an AO the first time, let alone ask people to do so again. That would also put me in the position of providing customer support (and I’m sure there would be plenty) for a product I make no money on, and I’m simply not interested in adding to my already overwhelming workload without at least some benefit. And finally, of course, it’s pretty likely that very few people would in fact actually use it, which would leave the problem completely unsolved in the end.
In the end, there’s really nothing to say or recommend. Animation Overrides will have conflicts with C:SI, and will continue to limit the kinds of moves that can be added to C:SI weapons, but they are an integral part of Second Life® and are in general a necessary evil.
That won’t stop me from complaining about them from a developer’s perspective, though 
“it’s pretty likely that very few people would in fact actually use it”
I think that if there was an AO tool that did not cover any C:SI animations and did not have any missing features compared to other AOs, people would start to use them. I’m not sure how quickly it would catch on, but I’d bet that eventually the C:SI community would reach the point where using a normal AO was comparable to using the spacebar.
Another option would be to start putting run and jump animations into the weapons, and then people could just turn off their AO, since the weapon would take care of all the animations. The problem with this is that people couldn’t customize the animations. I don’t think it would require that many extra animations, though, since a lot could be omitted. There wouldn’t need to be a walking or standing animation, since everybody runs and almost never stands without blocking. If I’m not mistaken, just run, jump and land would need to be added so that the weapons handle every animation used during a duel.
I have thought about putting jumps into the weapons, because there are a few jumps that really go with a specific weapon’s attacks, but run animations tend to be more individualistic, and sometimes even gender-specific.
I’m looking into the custom AO thing right now, good timing on the comment Colin. I suspect it would be easy enough to modify the ZHAO-II code so that it would behave exactly the same as any other AO outside of combat and during combat would not conflict with C:SI, but that still would put me in the position of supporting it.
I don’t like the idea of additional support, but that won’t stop me from seeing whether such a modification can be made and how well it might work. It may turn out to be worth it, I don’t know.
I still suspect that many people would not choose to use it, but I’ve been wrong before (gasp!!!)
Even if 75% of C:SI warriors used such a fancy-schmancy C:SI-friendly AO, and that’s almost certainly a much higher value than would happen in reality, it wouldn’t solve the problem of not being able to add some of the moves I’d like to add which conflict with AOs.
Of the 15,000 people who have fought with C:SI weapons there are thousands who are not actively part of the community, who only have the swords for looks or what have you. Those people are even less likely to switch AO’s, and that potentially leaves me with a product that looks like it’s broken to thousands of people.
Blech. I’ll just keep trying to think of something.
Someone recently released AutoZHAO, which is a ZHAO-II mod that listens for commands from furniture/poseballs and turns itself off when required. There’s an announcement in the forums. Just throwing that out there as something else to investigate, potentially. I’m not sure that a rapid-fire sequence of on/off commands issued over a chat channel would be lag friendly or even look right, but it might be one way to get the swords to partially control the AO.
And I hear you on the free support thing. It’s not fun. At all.
Heh, yeah, I’ve seen your thread on the forums (and in your profile) about some of the support issues you’ve had
The AutoZHAO idea is actually something I’ve been thinking of trying out. It wouldn’t necessarily be “rapid-fire”, since there’s only a few states that I’d even need to cooperate with the ZHAO, but there’s just no way for me to know how it would play out until I tried and tested it.
Thanks for the reply!!!
I remember being a newbie and wanting to add an animation. I wanted to design a typing replacement. Then I learned how AOs work, and couldn’t help but wonder what *else* was as poorly-designed about SL as that.
Anyway, the solution is for animation developers to make their animations the proper priority, rather than just putting it at 4. The swords aren’t broken, and the AO isn’t broken; it’s the animations themselves. Combat animations should be higher priority than standing-around animations.
(Though, like I said, AOs are kind of broken by default, because it’s a poor, laggy design. Maybe conversion to mono will help some, and maybe we’ll see some improvements such as this: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-408 or this: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-386 …)
@Cinco -
Well, yeah… I’d say that’s a pretty accurate assessment, for the most part. Part of the problem with the existing architecture is that there are only four animation priority levels, and since many of the default animations are at priority three already, that means that both animation overriders and melee weapons need to use priority four for many things.
In fact, the problem is even more fundamental, in a sense; Every melee combat weapon - whether C:SI or otherwise - is at heart an animation override itself, so here you have people wearing essentially two animation overrides. Wearing an AO itself implicitly means that you want those animations to play over all default animations, and there are limited ways to get that to happen, so there’s an intrinsic conflict there.
The JIRA issues you point to are a good step in the right direction, though alone they would not eliminate contention. Still, if LL ever implemented even one of those suggestions Second Life would be a better world overall for it.