Posted May 25, 2011
Hi, CDPR.
I've no idea how hard this is to implement or how others have solved this, but considering the magic you're clearly able to do in other scenarios using the Havok physics engine and whatnot:
Imagine the following scenario: I'm being attacked from, say, the north, and as is very, very frequently the case in Witcher2 there's many enemies coming at me at once. Reaching for my quiver I find it to be fresh out of any group style, so I decide to run away and try to outmaneuver or outflank the group. The lead bad guy is so close that he is about to swing, so I decide to dive/roll (whatever you call the move that is triggered with the space bar) -- I turn south and hit space, but I'm a split second too late and the blow connects.
And here's where things get supernatural really fast in a really bad way. Geralt stumbles, stunned, disoriented, BACKWARDS to the north, into the crowd of incoming attackers. It's like at some point prior to a calculation certain coordinates were set in stone, so that even though I've turned to the south to get my dive rolling action going, I'm considered to have been facing north when the attack animation was initiated in the general direction of my hitbox (or whatever), and so my animation plays out the wrong way around.
Perhaps one solution could be to "snap" Geralt around back to how the game thinks he was facing when the blow connected? It'd be kind of weird, like a client prediction error from back in the laggy quakeworld days when you'd rubberband back into a room you'd left through a door that, it turns out, you hadn't really opened even if it looked like that on your screen (but the server knew better) -- but nothing could be weirder than what it's like right now.
Better yet (but probably a lot more work is needed to achieve this) put together a "hit from the back, stumbling forward" type of animation and use that in the scenario I've described, calculating at the last second Geralt's facing and the direction from which damage was taken.
I've no idea how hard this is to implement or how others have solved this, but considering the magic you're clearly able to do in other scenarios using the Havok physics engine and whatnot:
Imagine the following scenario: I'm being attacked from, say, the north, and as is very, very frequently the case in Witcher2 there's many enemies coming at me at once. Reaching for my quiver I find it to be fresh out of any group style, so I decide to run away and try to outmaneuver or outflank the group. The lead bad guy is so close that he is about to swing, so I decide to dive/roll (whatever you call the move that is triggered with the space bar) -- I turn south and hit space, but I'm a split second too late and the blow connects.
And here's where things get supernatural really fast in a really bad way. Geralt stumbles, stunned, disoriented, BACKWARDS to the north, into the crowd of incoming attackers. It's like at some point prior to a calculation certain coordinates were set in stone, so that even though I've turned to the south to get my dive rolling action going, I'm considered to have been facing north when the attack animation was initiated in the general direction of my hitbox (or whatever), and so my animation plays out the wrong way around.
Perhaps one solution could be to "snap" Geralt around back to how the game thinks he was facing when the blow connected? It'd be kind of weird, like a client prediction error from back in the laggy quakeworld days when you'd rubberband back into a room you'd left through a door that, it turns out, you hadn't really opened even if it looked like that on your screen (but the server knew better) -- but nothing could be weirder than what it's like right now.
Better yet (but probably a lot more work is needed to achieve this) put together a "hit from the back, stumbling forward" type of animation and use that in the scenario I've described, calculating at the last second Geralt's facing and the direction from which damage was taken.