Swing Miss animation

[Bigglesworth]

Hello.
I have a couple of questions about OpenMw. I would be willing to learn and put in the work to make these inquiries a reality, however I am unsure of how to begin, or if what I am looking to do is even possible with the current Openmw build.

First off, I will preface this inquiry by saying that I love the dice roll mechanics of Morrowind. I enjoy the fact that my ability to hit or miss has a correlation to the skill of the weapon I am using, it makes for a great grind that feels rewarding when you finally are able to land multiple blows upon enemies.

My inquiries are as follows:
1) I was wondering if it is at all possible to pair an animation to miss attacks? I would love for my character to play an animation from a new set of animations for when he misses an attack, an example would be that the character strikes to right or to left instead of in center.

2) If it is possible to pair an animation with a miss attack, is it possible to have the engine differentiate between when you are attacking an NPC and a blank space

3) Is it possible to pair an animation where an NPC can step out of the way of your attack alternatively or in conjunction with the missed attacks?

4) How hard would it be to add support for animations with multiple actors, similar to a kill cam from skyrim.

I would love to attempt to bring realistic and seamless combat to Morrowind, it has always been a pleasure to play and mod, I am actually quite disappointed with the hack and slash combat in both oblivion and skyrim. Of the two though, oblivion's hack and slash combat seems much more palatable that skyrim's. However their lack of a dice roll effect removes some of the terror and excitement of the combat.

[Chris]

My inquiries are as follows:
1) I was wondering if it is at all possible to pair an animation to miss attacks? I would love for my character to play an animation from a new set of animations for when he misses an attack, an example would be that the character strikes to right or to left instead of in center.

Not really. The check for a successful strike doesn't happen until the swing animation is already playing and it can do a collision check (which is where it then does a dice roll to determine a successful hit). And even disregarding that, this wouldn't account for a target that's slightly to the left or right of center, where such an animation would still visibly connect anyway (unless the aim is so extremely off, it would look ridiculous, or like you were purposely trying to not hit the target). And even then, it couldn't account for another enemy being next to them where the off-center attack goes.

3) Is it possible to pair an animation where an NPC can step out of the way of your attack alternatively or in conjunction with the missed attacks?

No for the same reason. The check for a successful attack is too late to make any kind of dodge or miss animation work, and there's too much variability in where targets can stand relative to you and how many targets there can be around you. It would also run into issues if they're standing next to cliffs or other objects.

I would love to attempt to bring realistic and seamless combat to Morrowind, it has always been a pleasure to play and mod, I am actually quite disappointed with the hack and slash combat in both oblivion and skyrim.

Unfortunately, Oblivion and Skyrim combat is the natural progression of trying to make Morrowind combat consistent with strikes hitting. Skyrim's killcams even show the severe flaws with trying to mix them, where it tries to calculate a dice roll ahead of time for whether a killing blow hits so it can play a different hit/kill animation, but can't take into account how characters would move prior to the actual hit (in more instances I can count, I got killed from a killcam when I was successfully dodging their attacks and they were miles away from actually hitting me). You have to remove the roll-to-hit mechanic if you want seamless combat that avoids weapons phasing through opponents when missing, and don't want cheap shots where you are forced to take a hit despite successfully dodging. Real-time combat requires real-time checks, and trying to mix real-time combat with chance-to-hit combat has always been fraught with problems (it's why games tend to gravitate toward turned-based combat or dropping the chance-to-hit mechanic).

If you want anything better, you're going to have to look at more advanced systems, like Mount&Blade or Kingdom Come, which have an extremely different feel to combat and would need a significant overhaul.

[AnyOldName3]

As a side note, Morrowind dice-roll combat is loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons, and the hit vs miss mechanics there cover more than just the chance of the weapon not connecting. Some aspects are:

• Missing outright
• Dodging
• The attack striking a magical barrier
• The attack striking a physical barrier, e.g. a shield or armour

Unless we have a really complicated system where we do hit detection against bits of armour that have gaps you need to target, some of these misses still look like hits. Maybe one day our scripting API will give enough power to set up such a system and replicate the feel of Morrowind (e.g. have a script drive the weapon swing rather than a fixed animation so it can target the predicted position of the enemy's vulnerable spots and improve the quality of the prediction and accuracy of the swing as your skill improves), but it's certainly not something our API can do now, might be too impractical to ever make possible, and will be a massive effort to set up something many people just won't want, so may never materialise even if it becomes possible.