[MOD] More Realistic Combat Animations and Half-swording

[Yog-Sothoth88]

[MOD] More Realistic Combat Animations and Half-swording

While this isn't a standalone mod, but rather part of School of the Roach, I've decided to post one topic on it alone, since I believe I'm the first person properly adding new combat animations to Geralt.
By new I mean already baked and included animations on the man_base skeleton.
CDPR never provided us with animating tools, so I'm not sure whether adding real new animations is possible or not, although even if possible, it will require a massive amount of work.

Anyway, I've added up to 35 new animations ranging from light attack, heavy attack and half-swording (heavy attack).
As for half-swording, currently it's set to trigger on heavily armored enemies (changes the animations for heavy attacks).

You can watch a demonstration here:

 

[amfibiya89]

Looks interesting. Is this animations used anywhere in game. I didn't noticed.

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

For standard combat I took animations from: longsword, spear, 1h mace, shield and 1h sword.
For half-swording I took animations from: 2h axe, halberd and spear.

 

[fereno]

Looks very interesting!
Any ETA on release?

 

[gab96]

you should also release it as standalone

 

[spencerolmos]

Those are awesome dude.
How did you get geralt to do those animations? murzinio gave me this console command setanimationslotasync() I'm putting in 'man_guard_movement' but geralt does nothing.

 

[Dprelate]

Nice work man. some speed tweak and it'll be ready to go.
is there some sort of database for all animation names or are they scattered through several game files?

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

What do you mean by ETA? This is already part of the latest version of SOTR: http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1764/?

As for how to make Geralt properly play those animations, it's a huge pain in the ass, took me a week of non-stop work to get those adjusted for him.
If you just reference new w2anims files to his w2ent, you will come across several issues because Geralt anim events aren't exactly the same as the NPC ones.
You will need to use the Mod Editor with a special DLL that can read the events on the SetEntry chunks and then tweak one by one, until you get the animations to play correctly for Geralt;

 

[dawid0711]

Very promissing! Can you make standalone version, please ?

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

Managed to increase the speed of only the animations I added by adding custom events with no parameters (just the event name and animation name) and then delegating their callbacks to W3PlayerWitcher.
Since the event has no start time parameter, it's called as soon as the animation starts, which allows me to manipulate the animation playback right at the start.

    event OnAnimEvent_CustomLightAnimStart(animEventName : name, animEventType : EAnimationEventType, animInfo : SAnimationEventAnimInfo)
    {
        this.UpdateSpeed(true, true, 0.35f);
    }

    event OnAnimEvent_CustomHeavyAnimStart(animEventName : name, animEventType : EAnimationEventType, animInfo : SAnimationEventAnimInfo)
    {
        this.UpdateSpeed(true, true, 0.30f);
    }

    event OnAnimEvent_CustomHalfswordAnimStart(animEventName : name, animEventType : EAnimationEventType, animInfo : SAnimationEventAnimInfo)
    {
        //this.UpdateSpeed(true, true, 1.0f);
    }

In the above code, custom fast attacks have a 35% speed boost and custom heavy attacks have a 30% speed boost;

 

[shasiu]

Looks great.

For standard combat I took animations from: longsword, spear, 1h mace, shield and 1h sword.
For half-swording I took animations from: 2h axe, halberd and spear.

Can you make them dependent of weapon type? Something similar to TW1, where silver and steel swords and other (no witcher) weapon have different animations? Or it is impossible?

While this isn't a standalone mod,

Please make it standalone.

 

[SirRod1415]

I while back In tried poking around to get Geralt to use the npc crossbow animation and change Geralts small crossbow for the standard one. It was just to hard for me to find anything. So this looks promising! Awesome work!

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

Can you make them dependent of weapon type? Something similar to TW1, where silver and steel swords and other (no witcher) weapon have different animations? Or it is impossible?

It's possible by creating different combo aspects for both Combat Steel Sword and Combat Silver Sword, but since the game doesn't have that many combat animations, I wouldn't recommend limiting it even further.

I do not plan to make it standalone. It took me a lot of work just for this version.
While the modified w2anims file can be used anywhere, the combo aspects, tweaks to combat ranges, speed boosts, etc are handled by scripts, which I honestly don't feel like stripping and adapting for a standalone version.

 

[Nolenthar]

It's possible by creating different combo aspects for both Combat Steel Sword and Combat Silver Sword, but since the game doesn't have that many combat animations, I wouldn't recommend limiting it even further.

I do not plan to make it standalone. It took me a lot of work just for this version.
While the modified w2anims file can be used anywhere, the combo aspects, tweaks to combat ranges, speed boosts, etc are handled by scripts, which I honestly don't feel like stripping and adapting for a standalone version.

I'd expect standalone version to be easier to do than one intricated with other things . But do not worry too much, people will adapt it and create standalone versions.
SOTR is an awesome mod, probably the first one who really kicked ass and gave so many ideas to others, but nowadays, there are so many different game revamps (W3EE, Ghost Mode, SOTR, Gwynbleidd) that it makes it great when some mods are available standalone.

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

Updated the original post with a video showing the speed boosts on the added animations.

Look at how Geralt is far more efficient without that spinning stupidity, and this is with animations that weren't even designed for him.
And to think that some people go to great lengths to defend spinning...

I do hope that CD Projekt Red takes some notes and if they do make another The Witcher game, they ignore Sapkowski's ignorance on martial arts and actually do proper animations for Geralt.
The real reason for me to work on this was because it was either no spinning or uninstall the game.

 

[Ramon242]

There's actually only 2 bad "spinning" attacks that he uses, only when enemies are at med-far distances. In the CombatSword.ws:

man_geralt_sword_attack_fast_far_forward_1_rp_50ms
man_geralt_sword_attack_fast_far_forward_1_lp_50ms

Replacing them with any 40ms attack can feel better. Aside from these and the strong attacks, the spinning part of the other attacks are just purely visual. If you apply npc-attack animations to Geralt, you actually have to speed them up a bit or they won't be on par with his default moveset. Having been browsing npc movesets, I can't help but notice that many of them are terribly slow on top of the game already having terrible human AI; @ 3:05, the bowl-cut guy looks like he's flailing in slow motion.

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

There's actually only 2 bad "spinning" attacks that he uses, only when enemies are at med-far distances. In the CombatSword.ws:

man_geralt_sword_attack_fast_far_forward_1_rp_50ms
man_geralt_sword_attack_fast_far_forward_1_lp_50ms

Replacing them with any 40ms attack can feel better. Aside from these and the strong attacks, the spinning part of the other attacks are just purely visual. If you apply npc-attack animations to Geralt, you actually have to speed them up a bit or they won't be on par with his default moveset. Having been browsing npc movesets, I can't help but notice that many of them are terribly slow on top of the game already having terrible human AI; @ 3:05, the bowl-cut guy looks like he's flailing in slow motion.

You are wrong. There are several spinning animations, and spinning in general is worthless and bad, so much that I even mentioned uninstalling the game a while ago after I got tired of getting hit while Geralt was bullshitting around. Getting hit in vanilla isn't a big problem since the game is extremely easy, but once you are playing with mods and enemies can kill you with 2/3 hits in Death March, you start getting annoyed by the fact that he doesn't take his fights serious.
Some of those animations aren't even ADIST_Large and Geralt just stand in front of the enemy spinning like an asshole... Unacceptable for anyone who knows a thing or two about martial arts, or for that matter, for anyone who actually have a little bit of common sense.
I tested every animation one by one, taking as much as 2 to 3 hours on a single one, and unfortunately, I had to remove a bunch of animations as they contained useless spins, and I still had to leave some behind because there were no good replacements for them.

As for NPC animations being longer, that's also incorrect. Most are around the same duration as the player's animations (some are even shorter), the difference is that NPC animations have more frames during windup, which causes the actual attack to be triggered later than those of Geralt.
This was solved by adding custom events at start of the animation and having them delegated to W3PlayerWitcher. In there I can adjust the animation speed multiplier for those specific ones.
A good example of an animation combo that actually got better than the original ones, Roof Guard Strike + Rising Strike, both being heavy but with so little useless stuff on them that they feel like light attacks.

 

[Triangle]

Would love for this to be a standalone! Please consider it. Animations are one part of my own mod that I wanted to change, but never thought I'd have the time to do. Would really appreciate it if I could use this or at least see how it's done without unrelated bits of code.

Looks amazing!

 

[Yog-Sothoth88]

From my experience modding for this game, a cheat that takes 1 minute of changing one line or a stolen project will get it far more attention than what takes you weeks or months of hard work. Look at the (barely) attention that this thread or my sounds tool got.

Any major work that I do will be part of School of the Roach, which is the way I actually play the game (I'm modding for myself first and foremost).
The work is public though, so if people really want it, they can strip it from SOTR and implement it to their own set of mods, although you will have to do that on your own.

 

[ayyudee]

From my experience modding for this game, a cheat that takes 1 minute of changing one line or a stolen project will get it far more attention than what takes you weeks or months of hard work. Look at the (barely) attention that this thread or my sounds tool got.

Any major work that I do will be part of School of the Roach, which is the way I actually play the game (I'm modding for myself first and foremost).
The work is public though, so if people really want it, they can strip it from SOTR and implement it to their own set of mods, although you will have to do that on your own.

Their point was that considering the amount of big overhaul mods (far, far more complex than yours in many aspects which makes them incompatible from the get go) having a standalone of this amazing part of your work will contribute way more to the modding scene than just having everything wrapped up into your main mod.

Imaging what would have happened if the big modders we had/still have did the same since the game launched and force everyone to used their main wrapped mods (which for them are perfect, but for the majority of the rest the people probably aren't) for specific features that for many people would be more useful and enjoyable when combined with other free stuff.

Answer: we would have few big overhaul mods with no collaboration and resources beign distributed between modders while every modder would have a jealousy attitude towards everything but their own mod.