Power Customisation of a sort... macros, binds et al

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The problem with flight emotes is with how they're rigged. BABs was VERY uncomfortable allowing emotes to override basic animations, so I believe he rigged them so that they could only ever override the animation for flying forward, which is the loop which starts AFTER you're done leaning forward into it. It's still less clunky than how it was originally, which is to say you had to fly forward for four seconds, upon which point one of the four flight poses will be randomly chosen for you, and those did not include the original default flight pose. They are a MASSIVE kludge that's as unwieldy as it is make-shift.

In this regard, you are correct. This is best done as power customization, and in a larger sense as customization for our basic movement animations. When I say "basic movement animations," I mean the animations with which we jump, run in all four directions, fall from a jump, drop off a ledge, fly in all four horizontal directions, fly up, fly down (which currently has no animation associated with it, you just float down combat-ready), run with a rifle, run/jump/fly with a right-handed weapon, with a left-handed weapon, with a shield, as well as all the transition animations for landing, swapping directions, taking off, landing and so forth. There's a lot there to customize, put it like that But I'm confident it can be broken down into a not-too-cumbersome interface.

What you have to remember is that there's every chance that base movement animations CANNOT be customized. Ever. They're built into the system. However, we have the precedent of powers which can override these. Even before Ninja Run and Beast Run, we had a power which overrode the animations we used to move - Hover. Many people forget that Hover once used to use the same "perpetual backstretch" flying animation as Fly, until BABs admitted it looked goofy at low speed and swapped it for the upright Hover, which ONLY plays when you use a Hover or equivalent power, but does NOT fly when you are given a flight status buff without a power to swap your flight animation, such as Group Flight or Energy Group Flight.

What this means is that if we want to customize our running, jumping and flying animation, we may need to always run a "Custom Movement" power that has no actual buff or debuff stats, but alters our basic movement animations and is customizable at power customization. Sprint isn't a good power for this, as it has a cost and isn't something one can be expected to run constantly, and Walk isn't a good place as that has power suppression and a speed debuff on it. We'd need a new Inherent power available to everyone at character creation and customizable along with primary and secondary sets. At least that's how I envision it.

See, the problem with this is that the list of slash commands IS HUGE! Also, some of the commands in there are actually system commands, like "/lightmaplodscale - Set lightmap LOD scale." I don't even know what that means, but you can set it from a keybind. A few commands are also not meant to be called via macros, as well, such as /camrotate, the command to initiate camera rotation independent of model orientation. The descriptions on some of those are also vague and unhelpful, like /lfgset which tells you that it "Sets your "looking for group" status." The thing is that the "status" is on a geometric progression over 2, so it goes 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and then loops again after that for the various flags.

The thing with binds (and macros are just an extension of the binds system) is that they're actually quite complex and require a finer understanding of their internal operations to use properly. For instance, I have what I call a "walk around" bind which sets my character to constantly walk around a target, usually with Walk turned on (and usually on a girl ). This is done via a simple bind of "++left$$++follow" bound to a button. However, if you try to do it the other way around as "++follow$$++left" then it won't work, because moving left breaks follow, while following does not break moving left, which is set to ONLY break on a explicit call. Furthermore, + and ++ operators are used to toggle settings.

A +command is set to 1 when you hold down a bind button and set back to 0 on button release. A ++command is set to 1 on button press and then set to 0 on the next button press, and then set back to 1 thereafter, allowing you to toggle it on and off. All movement commands are toggles, in the sense that they you move your character by activating movement commands and leaving them on until your deactivate them on button release. Anything you do which requires movement, such as trying to bind flight positions, will need to work on that principle, and that principle is never explained anywhere that I've been able to find officially. I know about it because a person on the forums told me about it.

Of course, if you CAN design a macro/bind making window that cut out some more dangerous or unusable commands, gave better explanations on the existing ones and had an extensive tutorial to explain about quoted statements, $$ concatenation, + and ++ toggle commands and so on, then yeah, I don't have a problem with it. I certainly wouldn't complain about such a thing. I just suspect it would be a HELL of a lot of work for something that can be fixed with a better in-game help system which included a list of all slash commands and tutorials on how to use them.

Oh, on the other hand: If such a window allowed me to type in binds longer than 255 symbols, then I AM SOLD!!!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

What's a "customized quickchat?"

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is what I was thinking as well and I am also in support of it