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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Off topic but I thought in D&D 1 turn = 6 seconds. so 10 turns = 1 min?

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That''s the case in 3rd edition; I''m not sure about older versions, though, so Oort may be right as well. Of course, this lead to some bad gameplay in Neverwinter Nights, in my opinion. NWN tried to merge real-time gaming with the six-second turns of D&D, which lead to level one barbarians swinging their axe, and then standing there for the next five seconds--all the while their player is screaming, "Why aren''t you attacking again, you stupid %&*)%^!" Or at least, I was. When you got up to levels 15-20, of course, you were getting 4 or more attacks per turn, which made combat feel much more fluid. I found myself wondering if most of the play-testing had been done with high-level characters...

A solution would''ve been for the low-level characters to actually attack and recover slower than the high-level ones; I''m still wondering why the NWN team didn''t do this. (Granted, you don''t want to have a 3-second swing animation; probably a 2-second swing, with a 4-second recovery--give the artists a challenge making it look natural. )

This may have been OT, but I don''t think so, since the combat system was part of Oort''s original thread. And he''s the one that brought it up anyhow.

-Odd the Hermit

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Original post by Odd the Hermit

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Off topic but I thought in D&D 1 turn = 6 seconds. so 10 turns = 1 min?

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That''s the case in 3rd edition; I''m not sure about older versions, though, so Oort may be right as well.

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Note sure because I haven''t played since the early 80''s, and it was original 1974 edition D&D, not AD&D, but that''s the way I remember it. In any case...

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Of course, this lead to some bad gameplay in Neverwinter Nights, in my opinion. NWN tried to merge real-time gaming with the six-second turns of D&D, which lead to level one barbarians swinging their axe, and then standing there for the next five seconds--all the while their player is screaming, "Why aren''t you attacking again, you stupid %&*)%^!"

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...was exactly my point. NWN drove me nuts :D

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A solution would''ve been for the low-level characters to actually attack and recover slower than the high-level ones; I''m still wondering why the NWN team didn''t do this. (Granted, you don''t want to have a 3-second swing animation; probably a 2-second swing, with a 4-second recovery--give the artists a challenge making it look natural. )

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I did prototype this a bit and it was really difficult to make work. For the current release I have all characters swinging and recovering at the same speeds, but I still hope to return to the variable timing later. The problem is speeding up and slowing down the animations while blending in other animation that might be running at different speeds. It''s a headache.

I think the reason the NWN team didn''t do this was more for simplicity and obeying the AD&D rules. If you have multiple characters all attacking and blocking at different times, it becomes very difficult to manage. Despite this, I want to try it.

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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Off topic but I thought in D&D 1 turn = 6 seconds. so 10 turns = 1 min?

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Almost correct for AD&D 2nd and DnD 3rd.
Exactly, a round is 6 second (roughly) and a turn is 10 rounds, and so 1 minute.


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

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Original post by Oort
I did prototype this a bit and it was really difficult to make work. For the current release I have all characters swinging and recovering at the same speeds, but I still hope to return to the variable timing later. The problem is speeding up and slowing down the animations while blending in other animation that might be running at different speeds. It''s a headache.

I think the reason the NWN team didn''t do this was more for simplicity and obeying the AD&D rules. If you have multiple characters all attacking and blocking at different times, it becomes very difficult to manage. Despite this, I want to try it.

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Not....Commenting....NWN....

Roll : 20, Difficulty : 20, Success (20 is always a success)

Different animations have different length. Conceptually you can scrap the idea of rounds... which are only usefull for simplicity around a table. That''s also for speed and simplicity that you don''t roll every attack and the attack dice is ''all'' that happened in a round (timeframe), otherwise we would keep counting and rolling dices and never end a battle.

Say you have a time to ready (returning to base pose/other), each attack have a length (each anim as a length)...

Not sure I get your animation problem. As long as you try to keep 1 to 3 animations running concurrently at worse, it should be ok.
Now if you''re talking about speeding up the animation to simulate quicker reflex... I don''t think it''ll look too realistic.





-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

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Original post by Ingenu
Not sure I get your animation problem. As long as you try to keep 1 to 3 animations running concurrently at worse, it should be ok.
Now if you''re talking about speeding up the animation to simulate quicker reflex... I don''t think it''ll look too realistic.

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That''s exactly it. Here''s how I have it working right now:

The base time for an attack with a Long Sword is 2000ms, also the length of the standard attack animation. The standard recovery time is 1000ms. A block with a sheild has a base of time of 1500ms with a recovery of 1000ms. A block with the attack weapon (i.e. blocking with your sword) has a base of 1000ms with a recovery of 1000ms. All of these numbers are modified by the mass of the weapon, the character''s skills, and exhaustion.

If you are a highly skilled character, perhaps you can make the same attack in 1000ms. After you are finished your attack, what is to stop you from attacking again right away? Only that it would look bad if the attack animation stopped halfway through and then started over at the beginning.

Yes, I could introduce a delay such that the attack and the "recovery" always add up to 2000ms, but that negates any advantage of being highly skilled. The other answer is to have the minimum possible time to attack be 2000ms and have any less than perfectly skilled characters wait until their next attack. Then, of course, we have the NWN situation where everyne is just standing around waiting for their recovery time to elapse. I would like to try speeding up the animation, but it might look funny, as you said. Then again, what is the difference between a very fast, highly skilled person swinging a sword and a very slow, highly skilled person swinging a sword? I would say only the speed Maybe it will look ok.


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Darryl Long: Lead Coder The Pythian Project

Minor point: Diablo II''s player-chat is very well done and IMO better than a bunch of people standing around a 3D field. The text dominates the screen, which is very important -- in a game you can only see maybe 5-7 lines of text at one time. Also, Diablo-chat lets you easily see (literally) everyone in the room. Standing in a 3D environment, some people may be a bit far or obscured by other people or facing away from you.

~CGameProgrammer( );