Ya know, the animation names bug me. I've seen them on one of the powers websites somewhere before. Thought it might be City of Data, but does not seem to be there. I guess if Arcana can extract them it doesn't really matter, but I just have this nagging feeling that information is (or was) already out there somewhere.
Figuring out the names of animations isn't hard, and in fact Codewalker posted a dump of the sequencer file (referenced earlier) which contains all the names of the animation moves.
Connecting them to powers, on the other hand, is more tricky. You'd need a complete dump of the powers database to do that, including references to how the powers database used all of its sequencer entries. I don't think any such thing was ever published. I *had* a script I used to run that would do exactly that, take every power and figure out which animation(s) it ran, calculate the rooted time, and compare to cast time, so I could warn the devs if they made a power that rooted for longer than its cast time (which would make it slower and less effective than they thought it was) but with each patch release the devs would change something that would break it. It wouldn't run today against I24. If I was smart, I would have made it use a dynamic schema script that pulled from the client, but I'm not quite there. I would have to fix it by hand, and that would take time. Its on my TODO list, but its a little more complicated than you might think, partially because I know a little more about this than I think most players do. And that means how I get the data is separate from how I should present the data, and how we might make that data available to other players.
See, we talk about a power's "animation" but that is a singular statement that doesn't precisely match reality. In fact, theoretically speaking every power has potentially
eight separate animations it might play**, and not all of them flow naturally through the sequencer (meaning, if you start one, the sequencer won't automatically start the next one without being told). It goes like this: are you in combat mode? If not, play the PRE-combat animation. Often, this is nothing much, but when you have a weapon, you would call this "weapon draw." This is the animation that draws the weapons. Are you interruptible? If so, play the WINDUP animation. Upon activation, play the ACTIVATE animation. Then, if you're not doing anything else, play a postfix animation (often, this puts the character back into a neutral stance to make nicer transitions to other attack animations).
That's four. What are the other four? Are you flying? Then all of those potentially have alternate versions.
So if you want to reproduce exactly what happened when your AR blaster decided to snipe someone from out of nowhere, you'd have to at least play the weapon draw animation, then play the sniper windup, wait about two seconds, then play the actual sniper animation. These are all separate animations, and triggering one won't automatically trigger the others. And timing is critical, because some parts of some animations are not interruptible, meaning if you are playing that part of that animation, you can't interrupt it to play another. As an experiment, try this. Add this to emote.cfg:
Emote SniperBlastWindup
Bits COMBAT TECHWINDUP
End
Emote SniperBlast
Bits COMBAT CAST STRONG
End
Then, log into Paragon Chat, and add two macros (it has to be macros: no one types fast enough):
/macro sbw "e SniperBlastWindup"
/macro sb "e SniperBlast"
All you have to do is click sbw, and then wait one second, and then click sb. Not hard, if you are clicking buttons. Almost impossible if you are typing commands, because the windup will end before you can get that shoot out. And you can't e SniperBlast$$e SniperBlastWindup because then you'll only see the Blast - the Blast will instantly override the Windup because its interruptible (macros process right to left, so if you go the other way around the same thing will happen for different reasons).
I said earlier the activate usually came about two seconds later, but I asked you to wait one second. That's because there's apparently no maintain bit feature in PC, so you can't hold the Windup animation for longer than it wants to play by default. The actual game could hold you there indefinitely, but at the moment Paragon Chat can't do that. If you wait longer than one cycle of the windup animation, it will stop playing. And you can't back to back them: try it.
Also: Codewalker, if you are reading this, there seems to be a bug with TECHWINDUP. COMBAT TECHWINDUP will only play every other time. If I play COMBAT TECHWINDUP, let it expire, wait, wait, wait some more, and the try again, it still won't play the second time. But then it will immediately play the third time. Then not play the fourth time. Almost like TECHWINDUP was toggling something separate from COMBAT.
** Sometimes more, for various reasons including Left/Right randomization and other factors
