Re-useable fighting stance

[Jetryl]

I know you're not necessarily planning to do this animation type, but I'd like to chime in with technique suggestions.

In a bobbing motion like this, each body part needs to move independently. Some of them will not move downwards, and will instead fold sideways to allow the torso to move downwards. Knees, especially - arms will also sometimes stay relatively stable. Hair will sometimes fall slowly due to air resistance - basically failing to make it all the way down to the depth the rest of the body is dropping to before the upswing begins.

Here are two example images from that allacrost project I'm working on:

[Crush]

How fast are you going to be able to change "your entire armor".. if you have multiple pieces of equipment to move around?.. removing what you're wearing and replacing it will take atleast a couple or few seconds.. and in that time, you'll probably have taken a bit of damage.

After I did some minor modifications to my client and recompiling I just need one keypress to change my complete equipment. You can not rely on the assumption that the user interface will stop the player from doing something. When you want to make something impossible you have to make it impossible server-sided.

[Pauan]

You won't be able to change your armor and swing your sword at the same time, but it's because swinging your sword will require pressing a button on the keyboard, while changing your equipment will probably still require you to move your hand to the mouse and fiddle around with dragging and dropping..
How fast are you going to be able to change "your entire armor".. if you have multiple pieces of equipment to move around?.. removing what you're wearing and replacing it will take atleast a couple or few seconds.. and in that time, you'll probably have taken a bit of damage.

I just don't see that amount of time ever allowing anyone to really exploit any sort of unfair advantage that they may have with some secondary set of equipment.

..and yes, I think we should let people change gear while they're "being slaughtered" ..No matter how well its done, I don't imagine anyone will ever say, "Hey, good job disabling the equipment menu during battle, that's super realistic!" ..but I can totally imagine some whiney line such as, "Why can't I change my equipment?! waaaah..."

To me, this is less a matter of realism (since this will never be anything close to a simulation of real-life) and more a matter of preference. It comes back to the problem that you can't please everyone.. If you can get the graphics squared away and get someone to do a good job with the code/script/whatever, have at it. I'll just leave this one be .. just remember that like all of the other frames of the existing human playerset, these will probably need to be done for up to 9 other races.

In that case, assuming changing equipment is not easy (e.g. no keyboard shortcuts) then I will agree with you. But, assuming you can assign equipment to a shortcut, then this would indeed be necessary.