Combat System Discussion

Combat system
#63

That’s a good point. I kind of touched upon this by saying “successful hits” and “where and how one hits.” I guess I wasn’t very clear though. I play a game called The Dark Mod, and in it you can fight with a short sword. If you attack an enemy’s plate mail it deals no damage. So even if an enemy is unable to block my attack, I must hit unarmored parts of his/her body. I wouldn’t consider slashing plate mail with a sword a very efficient attack, but even though a sword is a cutting weapon it will still deal concussive force to the body under the plate mail, especially to the head; so it should at least deal a small amount of damage, I think. Even if I am right about the concussive force, a sword would probably break before you could kill an enemy by bashing their armor with it. So I guess your right on this point.

I guess the gist of what I was trying to say is that I don’t want the player or enemies to be able to take an unrealistic amount of damage to their bodies.

#64

Not really. Medieval fighting masters (such as Johannes Liechtenauer) encouraged fighters to “sieze the vor,” or get in there and strike first. Waiting around lets your opponent control the fight. Granted, I understand that some recommended holding back, but one in particular (George Silver) only recommended it for beginning fencers.

EDIT

So I checked with one of the guys who was going to do that, and it was news to him (his reaction was “What? NO! Whoa, no! No way!”). Probably won’t happen.
He said that some people have done it (in T-shirts and unsafe speeds) and posted it online, so I’ll have to look those up later.

#66

The one thing in combat i want to know is, The archery system. Will it be Modern archery with regular target stance.

Or will it be like shown in the books and like videos on youtube where they show “Forgotten” Archery techniques. Like multi arrow hold for quick twanging, Off Balance twanging. Also Strong arm and weak arm twanging ect ect…

Also will there be a preference for Strong or weak arm or do we have to train it up?

We have seen how sword combat is like, but how is Archery. Also Polearms and spears would be nice to see as well

#67

Not sure what Inverse Kinematics means, but it sounds great!

#68

Inverse kinematics is simply the best way to show the actio-reactio principle. Pretty simple: If you want to have the animation happen, no matter what stands in the way, then you call it forward kinematics. The animator or designer decided, how an animation will look like. Or you have for example a target pose which an animated figure wants to reach but each object standing in the way will hinder the animation. Now you need to calculate the forces represented on each side and the animation will then result in a direction and therefore define the outcome. No animator is going to animate each single step for this. Only the target post and how the target pose will be reached is defined, the rest should be pure calculations.

Or to make it easier: Punch in the air - forward kinematics. Punch in the air with a heavy brick wall in between - inverse kinematics.

2 Likes
#69

Inverse Kinematics is a reference to the way you stack a bone hierarchy, and how you control that bone hierarchy. Inverse Kinematics is basically, imagine you aren’t controlling your shoulder or your elbow… but only controlling your hand & wrist (by some magic). Now imagine moving the hand around, the rest of the arm would follow. This is meant by IK. It’s easier for animators when you only have to move the hand, and the rest follows.

But in regards to Kingdom Come, I am thinking that it’s going to mean like the sword hitting the other sword, and these two swords affecting each other with a force and a torque.
Usually in sword fighting games, there are pre-made animations for hitting from left to right, right to left, from above, thrust, and so on… and the defender have pre-made defense animations.
What Dan Vavra has said leads me to believe they are not doing it the pre-made way, but a procedural animation system… where you give the sword a direction or order… and it goes into that direction as best as your hand can manage, and if it hits another sword or a shield, it will stop and the kinetic force will be transferred to the defender. F.exe. a dent in his armor, that will eventually be broken down (this we know from video logs). Or the shield gets knocked to the side… or the sword gets knocked away, or maybe you even knock the sword OUT of his hands?
Not like a pre-made animation. So it has the potential to look and feel amazing… all it comes down to is “execution” - how will it play. Thats why Im excited for that video :slight_smile:

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#70

In most games NPCs dont care if they got hit with an arrow (etc.). so i was wondering if i shoot an arrow through a leg would that NPC ,for example,humble or how are they going to respond to wounds , pain (etc.) ?

#71

What you could see in the trailer was already amazing. The head and therefore your view changed accordingly, so I guess this will be part of the inverse kinematic if the structure of the object is not stable anymore as it used to be.

Response to pain will be crying and screaming, I guess.

#72

Hmmm that may be. But I am thinking that head movement was pre-scripted. This was a kickstarter video, so I’m not sure how much of it is representative.

Remains to be seen. Hence: We need to see the video on combat.

#73

They already said that they want it like you’ve seen. A hit on a certain part of your body should affect the whole body. Therefore a hit in the stomach would let you bend down and you would just see the ground until the pain relieves.

If that’s not going to happen, then they’re doing a big mistake with their trailer if they say it’s in-game footage and not rendered and so on.

#74

That video was fun to watch!

#75

this looks really bad. more shoving match than any real swordplay. the long sword video above was much more how i envision medieval combat.

we are almost at the 700k mark, meaning the motion capture stretch goal is pretty much as good as achieved. hopefully that will improve the combat even further, providing they do not motion cap these guys in this video :wink:

EDIT: for clarity reasons, I am not referring to the video right above, I am talking about the Battle of Nations one (quoted in my post)

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#76

Hi Patrick. Nice to see someone from Caid on the forums (I was once upon a time from the Shire of Heatherwyne, House Meade). SCA combat is certainly like certain types of medieval combat (mace, pick w/ shield or sword against earlier mail armor which is what SCA tries to emulate). It’s not the same as what scholars think historical combat was like due primarily to safety. There’s no wrestling and you won’t see many SCA fighters use half-sword techniques or murder blows or kicks. Most of the SCA fights I’ve been in as well as witnessed use techniques that aren’t overly effective when used with an arming sword against an opponent in full harness. Plate is very good at stopping swords and historical fencing manuals emphasize using techniques to bypass the armor when using swords rather than pierce it. You might take a look at this video (and the rest in the series). These are techniques out of historical fencing in armor manuals and are the real stuff as far as we can tell.
Note that this in no way means real combat is slow or that a video game will be able to work as a game at real combat speeds. Combat is fast, brutal and typically short. I doubt a game can run at real combat speed and still be playable.

3 Likes
#77

Depends on the swords we’re talking about. For the period in which this game is set, the blades on longswords tend to be more balanced than the blade heavy ones from a century or two before. They also tend to have much thinner and sharper points with a focus on thrusting through gaps in plate and penetrating the holes in mail. Their center of gravity is closer to the pivot point of the blow and that makes them swing much faster than one handed swords of the period (note that trained fighters would mostly only swing the blade at lightly armored or unarmored opponents).
One thing that makes fighting complicate, and perhaps to complicated for a video game, is that the fighting techniques you use will vary both with the weapon in your hand and the armor of your opponent. You half-sword stab at a man in plate to hit the gaps with a long sword but you swing at him with a poleaxe. If he is unarmored, swinging the sword is a better technique to employ. I suspect all this is too much for the devs to include but we can hope.

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#78

From what I recall of the commentary on the 70’s Three Musketeers movies in many of the fight scenes the director made the actors use sharps. They are filming with sharp weapons (Christopher Lee was nearly killed in one scene and only saved due reflexes from years of fencing). Watch how they hesitate to close and attack. I doubt it is a realistic depiction of trained fighters (they are actors after all and only Lee had ever fenced before) but the director certainly does a good job of showing what he wanted to demonstrate, that these were fights to the death and the combatants knew it.

#79

Always worth mentioning though that Lichtenauer / Ringeck fighting like this is generally taught unarmoured nowadays and probably from the time of Ringeck onwards. It can be very quick because the swords would have been sharp and the combatants largely unprotected. A ‘touch’ in a tournament like this scores a point (or in a real combat, would cut the skin). I would question whether this style of fighting was used by or against armoured knights. Quite a few of the strikes would be ineffective against a man in armour. I don’t know whether any of the other manuals offer a more effective system for and against armour.

#80

The last update was great! I think they’re on the right path. At least, the combat is quite similar to what we actually do in our medieval combat group. I’d love to see more variety in attacks, though. But I guess it’s not easy to do that and keep the controls simple, I guess. Good job so far, guys!!

#81

I think the video update now answers the question about longsword speed. If the example they showed was someone who had not levelled up much, then the speed is realistic. It will be good to see the fighting and reaction times speed up after training and experience. I know I can’t fight as fast as some of the people in the video examples in this thread!

#82

The animations are great, and it’s nice that there’s more than one type of attack, although I wish it were a bit more complex, especially seeing that with just one button you can automatically block. A blocking system like Chivalry’s would be interesting in a singleplayer game that uses first person camera too, and not lead to easy-mode blocking.

#83

I like the combat for the most part, but I’m disappointed that there was so much static parry/riposte action going on. I’d love to see more binding/winding. It’d also be nice to see the enemies move and change their guard more.

Off the top of my head, I know that Talhoffer has both armored vs armored and unarmored vs armored plates.

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