Preliminary melee-combat idea

[Yay - I can post! ... Thanks!]

We're going to go with the melee combat interface based primarily on gesture based mouse-control... so in general the player controls his weapon and shield (if any) by moving the mouse.

We typed up a preliminary brainstorm of our idea. It's probably going to change considerably, but here it is:

http://imi.aau.dk/~tkof06/CombatInterface-brainstorm.docx

We would like to discuss this idea with Flemming.

hey yeah, just fix that posting thing...

What is this docx? docs is usually from word 2007, but I seem to get a bunch of unstructured xml files from a .zip

Maybe post the ideas here instead?

Well... it's been explained in the document using images and quite a bit of text... so let's try this first:

http://imi.aau.dk/~tkof06/CombatInterface-brainstorm.doc

Weaponry
Okay, some nice points in that document. I think the first thing though, is to get your mindset a little bit into the future, away from iron swords and wooden shields. We need to think about what kind of weaponry, future fighters would use. Already today, melee combat is rarely more than just the hands or a knife. We think technology will have an influence on this however. We have a couple of ideas for future weapons, like the powergloves and the dual cross which mixes melee and range combat. Weapons needs be easily carried and hideable.

Zones
The idea of using hitting zones is good. We plan to have 9 zones that you can hit and instead of defending against a hand attack with a physical shield, we will use defensive moves on the high, mid and lower region of the 9 areas to block the attacks.

Mouse
You mention the use of the mouse, which is good. We need to not use the mouse as the center of the control however, since many laptop players would be eliminated by this, but instead use the mouse as a good alternative to the keyboard.

Patterns
Pre-recorded attack patterns is a great idea and it might actually solve the temporary lag issues, but it will also make the combat dependant on them instead of being a supplement, breaking the illusion of ease of use. This is why the client-server calculation and synchronization is the best technical way to go. I would love to have the option of pre-recorded attack patterns however, since that will really add to the user experience of the combat.