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.

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 …)

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!!!

And I hear you on the free support thing. It’s not fun. At all.

Takuan has a great post about how AOs break C:SI combat animations and how stuff like landing and stand anims can mask blocks and sometimes even attacks so yer opponent can’t tell what yer doing. You know what I’m talking…

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.

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!!!)