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 
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