The Hidden Forest

I've noticed that dual wield animations for old models seem to never trigger. After staring at my characters swinging for a while, I noticed that the DW animations would trigger rarely in some cases. I know for sure that with high level characters that hit with their off-hand frequently, the DW animation triggers frequently and often many times in a row, but these were triggering once every minute or less than that. So I did some testing with different weapons. I was testing with a human, a dark elf and an iksar and the results were the same for all three.

The one setup which seemed to consistently trigger the DW animation was dual wielding 1HS, about once every minute or so. Not as much as it should, but at least the animation itself is working. If you change this setup of two 1HS, though, things seem to change. If you put a 1HB or piercing weapon in either the primary or offhand, with the 1HS in the other, the DW animations seem to stop completely(or an even lower rate)... with one notable exception, a first.

If you remove your primary 1HS so you just have a fist and leave the 1HS in the offhand, you'll start seeing the DW animation happen and it looks completely normal, like it was on live (or P99 now? I don't remember but I think it works fine there). You can even switch out the off-hand to 1HB or piercing and the DW animation continues to work normally... unless you remove your offhand so that it is also a fist, and then it's back to no/infrequent DW animations (even with a monk).

In summary, if your primary is a fist and your offhand has a weapon, the DW animation works as it should. It seems that the game recognizes offhand attacks with a weapon to trigger the DW animation, as it should, but if you put a weapon in your primary then it somehow breaks the mechanic and stops working.

Double-attack animations seem to be in a similar state of triggering infrequently and varying with different weapon load-outs, but I haven't seen one where it triggers as frequently as it should. It seems to always either trigger infrequently or never.

Edit: I'm running the THF UF client, fully patched etc.

Ran some more tests after seeing that Song of the Orcslayer, taking haste from 200% to 225% dramatically increased DW animations (once every few seconds, can get several in a row), but only for the dual 1HS user (20/23 delay weapons)(tests in the first post were all with 200% haste). Dual wielding daggers and 1HB still yielded no DW animations with the same haste and all 20 delay weapons. But, should DW animations even be connected to how fast you are attacking? AFAIK it shouldn't.

With this new information I tried to look at what effect different weapon delays had on the frequency of DW animations. Equipping a 20 delay sword with a 20 delay dagger yields no DW animations in either configuration, with or without 225% haste. However, equpping an 18 delay sword with a dagger, in either configuration, and boom, DW animations worked with a dagger, even with only 200% haste. Note that the dual 1HS configuration worked with 20 and 23 delay weapons. I then looked in my bank for a dagger less than 20 delay and found a 17 delay one. Sure enough, equipping a 17 delay dagger I saw dual piercing DW for the first time, and frequently, at 200% haste. Equip a 20 delay dagger and the DW animation stops completely. When haste was removed completely, 100%, DW animations remained and... seem to increase in frequency? Not sure, but equipping the 20 delay dagger again at 100% and DW animations stop completely again. So, no matter what haste you're at, 20 delay daggers get no DW animations, and having a 17 delay dagger equipped in either hand gets DW animations.

So obviously there's some weird stuff going on here. That's all I got for now.

Have you run DPS tests and found if there is any relationship between the animations and your DPS?

No, but I doubt the game would be tracking DPS in order to trigger an animation. It must be something more simple. Is that what you were suggesting?

I have to wonder and i dont mean to seem rude by asking.. but why are you even bothered by the animations? Why go through all this time and effort into something so.. and again no offence intended here.. meaningless?
I mean, if it does affect DPS then that's a game changer, people would change their spells / songs to increase the animations and thus the dps... but otherwise.. whats the point in this?

The devs will correct me if im wrong but i dont think the animations are something they can fix. And if they can, it'll probably be very low on their priority list with all the new content coming out, working on ROF client and im sure, many other projects yet to be announced.
i cant speak for most people but i dont even see my animations, too many bodies in the way, cameras spinning around, or more likely just too busy watching health bars and clicking hotkeys to watch the characters. Archery animations are very noticeable though, i must admit.

I guess just clarifying what youre trying to achieve, what the end result of all this testing might be, might lead to other people in the community helping to test or parting with their experience.

I understand that combat animations may be meaningless to some and ultimately do not impact the underlying mechanics of the game. Also, I never intended to suggest that this was actually impacting DPS, it seems to me that off-hand attacks and double attacks are working just fine. It's only that the animations for these things don't seem to be working right.

When I first noticed this I thought it might be a client issue, which is why I posted it here. I was having some issues with my human animations which I fixed; there was a discussion about it here which discovered a fix and it was a client side issue. So, initially, I thought this DW animation issue might also be a client side problem, but after looking at it further it does seem like it would be a server side issue so I agree it would probably require effort on the devs part to fix. A lot of effort? I don't know, but if it is working on the P99 server then maybe not.

I think the animations are cool and a part of character progression, but I know it's a small thing, especially considering that it may be unique to old models which I don't think many people use these days. In any case, if you're right and it does require effort on the devs part to fix then it's entirely at their discretion to fix it and this post will merely draw their attention to it, although I would be suprised if they had not already become aware of it at some point in the past.

Was just wondering if animations were related to DPS. Good that they are not... I always disliked the the first person animation of skeleton illusion, especially when swinging a two hander. Anyway good to have someone looking at this, you might try various illusions as well. Let us know what you find.

I believe attack animation is handled by eqemu source code so definitely not my area of expertise but I'd have thought it's logistically unlikely for all attack animations to play completely on THF due to the high rate of attacks (low delay, high haste); by the time a single main hand animation has played through I'm sure the next main hand attack has already occurred in most cases: assuming this is something that could be "fixed", I am not certain there's any universally consistent way to fix it (how do you measure an agreeable number of offhand animations to play and when should an offhand animation play if both a main hand and offhand animation could play?)

As stated above, I've got limited understanding of this but assuming some types of attack (punch, slashing, piercing) have different animations that maybe have different lengths then I imagine the results may also differ. But this is all just theory crafting.

Without looking into this in any detail, I'd suggest this is more likely a result of THF's disparate customisation compared to p1999/live than any fundamental flaw in THF's source code (really fast attacks, animation not designed to keep up, unlikely to see similar results between THF and p 1999).

Either way, it's not something we have any bandwidth to investigate (as mrhorrn suggested, if this is indeed something that requires fixing, we don't have the resource to even confirm that to be true as it's quite low priority even if it was a fixable issue), but thank you for bringing it to our attention. If we can get around to it and do identify that it's a relatively quick win issue/bug then we'll of course make a correction (offhand animations have equal rights you know ). Just no promises as to if or when.

Either way, it's not something we have any bandwidth to investigate (as mrhorrn suggested, if this is indeed something that requires fixing, we don't have the resource to even confirm that to be true as it's quite low priority even if it was a fixable issue), but thank you for bringing it to our attention.

I understand completely.

Let me say a few things about how I think this is supposed to work. Combat animations are played in a sequence as you are attacking and each animations is a block of time. There are swing animations, proc (cast) animations, double attack animations and dual wield animations. These animations all vary slightly in how long the animation takes to play, from I think about 1.5 to 2.5 seconds (that's for the animation itself, if are you swinging slower than the animations then there will just be gaps of time between playing combat animations). That means that if you're swinging your weapons faster than about once every 2 seconds, that's a 20 delay weapon with no haste, you are swinging faster than the animations. The point is, it doesn't take much to swing faster than the animations, the animations in EQ have always been slow when compared to how fast people are actually swinging, that's been true since vanilla EQ on well equipped characters with haste items, buffs and fast weapons.

I think the speed of some animations do change slightly depending on how fast your character is swinging, but not a whole lot. Typical swing animations don't play slower than about 2.5 seconds and don't play faster than about 1.5, maybe 1.2 or 1.3 at the lowest(just did some tests on this). At this point you may be thinking, wait a second, I know I remember seeing characters swing their weapons/fists/whatever faster than once every 1.5 seconds Yeah, that's because of double attack animations. Double attack animations are basically the swing animation played twice really fast over about the same period of time as the basic swing animation. So even though the animation block time hasn't changed, it looks like the animations are playing twice as fast. All melee get the double attack skill and will be double attacking by the time they have fast weapons and haste and all that, coinciding with the need to show them swinging more, and double attack animations do that nicely.

I don't know if THF has modified the minimum weapon swing speed in the game (a haste cap applied to effective weapon delay after calculating haste in addition to the haste cap itself) but I think it's fair to say that the issue of swinging your weapons too fast for the animations and how the game deals with it is something which has existed in the game since the beginning and is probably not unique to THF, again, unless swing speed cap has been changed but even then it's the same thing just to a greater extent.

All this begs the question: so if you're doing several attacks (double attacks, off hand attacks, procs etc) while a single animation is playing, how does the game decide which animation to play when the next animation block comes up? I can only guess, of course, but I certainly remember it being a little random with some animations prioritized over others. I remember when watching a high level character with haste and fast weapons attacking, almost every animation was either double attack, dual wield or a proc cast, with single attack animations rarely occuring on the rare occurrece of not double attacking or dual wielding since the last animation played. If you're swinigng really fast, then typically you will have 2 attacks, possibly 3 in extreme cases, rounds while an animation is playing. Does it pick a random round of attack since the last animation played or the most recent one? Don't know, but I think, effectively, either of those ways of choosing wouldn't result in a significant difference in the frequency of the different animations.

All this stuff I just said was only taken from anecdotal experience in the game (extensive, but still anecdotal) and a tiny bit of testing, so it was mostly pulled from my ass. If anyone knows any better please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure I'm wrong about some things, just not sure how wrong.