Miscellaneous mount experiments (plus Demigryph Knight prototype)

[Medusa0]

While revisiting the old Berserker thread from a while back, I found some interesting and random properties of mounts in M2TW:

1. Mounts can have working knockback/knockback_move animations assigned to them in descr_skeleton.txt, however, knockdown animations do not function at all, even if one adds the same lines to their riders' skeleton entries.

2. For horse and camel classes, knockbacks only occur via physical collisions (heavier units with mass 8 times or larger). Knockbacks can be used to interrupt almost any animation sequences except when the horses and camels are in melee combat or charging. Interestingly enough, only the riders are affected by knockbacks inflicted by melee attacks and projectiles.

3. Elephant type mounts can be knocked back by projectiles in addition to physical collisions, unlike infantries however, any projectiles can knock them back irregardless of their mass values in descr_projectile.txt. Like horses and camels, they gain the immunity to knockbacks in combat, but projectiles can be used to slow them down when they are marching or pursuing a target. They are completely immune to knockbacks caused by melee attacks however.

4. Knockbacks and knockdowns inflicted by elephant type mounts are actually bugged: frontal and back knockbacks on the target are reversed.

5. Mahouts (elephant driver) actually has an unused but working taunt animation sequence, it can be enabled by changing the following lines in their skeleton in descr_skeleton.txt:

From:
anim        taunt_1
To:
anim        er_taunt_1

This animation however only plays if there are no additional riders on the elephant (except for captains and generals) besides the mahout.

6. Like in Rome Total War, elephant type mounts with maximum of two riders actually forces the mahout animation to the captain/general if one is assigned to the unit on the battle map, this is likely a carry-over from Rome where the smaller forest elephants do not carry a howdah (carriage) so the captain will ride on the elephant, instead of standing on them. However, assigning the second rider via the EDU will cause the extra crew to stand as usual.

7. Elephant riders cannot attack in melee combat, ever, unlike chariot crews in Rome. Despite not being able to attack, the extra crews (not the mahout) can be killed by a charge attack if they are low enough to the ground. However, we can still emulate Empire Total War style elephants or Demigryph Knights in Warhammer by modifying the mahout's animations.

8. Camels have an unused attack sound effect found in descr_sounds_generic.txt, this can easily be enabled by modifying the .evt files associated with this skeleton type.

9. For elephant type units, you can make the game to display the defensive stats (hp, armour, defence skill, shield) of the riders rather than the mount itself by giving the mount the defence skill value of 0. Know that this only hides the remaining armour and hp stats of the mount and does not disable them. This is only useful if you want to display the upgradeable armour stats for the riders, but trades off by the mount vulnerable to armour piercing attacks due to the removal of defence skill.

10. Camels are very weak in melee in M2TW, especially against infantries, why? This is because their collision box is far bigger than their model would suggest, and the height of the rider actually meant they have trouble reaching infantries.
We can make them much more effective by making the following changes in descr_mount.txt:

type				camelclass				camel
model				Mount_Camel
radius				1.8
x_radius			0.8
y_offset			0.2
height				2.5
mass				3.75
banner_height		0
bouyancy_offset		1.8
water_trail_effect  camel_water_trail
root_node_height	1.52
rider_offset		0.0, 0.38, -0.2

Note that this makes them somewhat ugly as the rider will sink into their mount. I have yet to find another way to increase their effectiveness even with skeleton changes, perhaps we may need to make shorter camels.

An extra note about knockdowns caused by infantries in M2TW: The launching attribute for weapons in the EDU is completely disabled (despite not causing any errors), so the only real way for infantries to knockdown other infantries is to bump into them with their collision box while possessing substantially higher mass (at least 20x, maybe larger, however too much of a difference will cause the affected unit to "teleport" instead of playing the proper knockdown animation sequence). Bumping can be facilitated by giving the heavier infantry unit access to animations that make them move around in melee combat.

I will post more details on implementing the fake Demigryph Knights later.

[Medusa0]

And here it is! A working approximation to the Demigryph Knights from Warhammer modelled on the standard European armoured horse. This unit is basically an elephant disguised as a horse, with modified mahout animations to emulate the rider attacking in melee combat. Sample texts as well as placeholder models have been included. This requires the user to be familiar with re-creating the animation files from either Caliban's animations or other mods' unpacked animations.

Currently available attack animations for this mount are:
1. Frontal kick against all units except for elephants
2. Jump/lunge against infantries
3. Headbutt against other elephant type units

Screenshots below (lance variant, lance variant with captain, and halberd variant):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Since this is simply implemented as a horse model with a renamed bone_H_saddle to bone_E_platform, it should be very easy to adopt it to other mods' horse-derived models (for example, Call of Warhammer's Demigryphon model ).

This was made possible with KnightErrant's GOAT/GOAL tools, so Kudos to him, wherever he is now.

[AnthoniusII]

What about smaller in size horses. Lets suppose i want to recreate Mongolic short hight horses. What changes do i make to the rider's values inorder not to be on air?

[WhiffOfGrapeshot]

What about smaller in size horses. Lets suppose i want to recreate Mongolic short hight horses. What changes do i make to the rider's values inorder not to be on air?

In descr_mount there's a rider_offset value, which is x/y/z based on the rider's bone_pelvis and mount's bone_H_saddle. You can lower the rider by lowering the middle number. You'll have to save it and load it in game to see if you have it just right, or if it needs further adjustment.

[Medusa0]

The rider_offset actually matters quite a lot to manage the effectiveness of the horse/camel cavalry unit, as generally the lower the middle (y) value, the more the cavalry will be able to attack/defend against infantries (we usually do not see the block/parry animations from cavalries in M2TW unlike RTW, this along with the generally lower defence skill of units, make them play less often), as well as the y_offset, which represents the "dead space" taken up by the mount's head that the rider cannot attack in, naturally these goes hand-in-hand with the strike_distance and impact deltas defined by descr_skeleton.

One more thing I forgot to mention, there is a small twitch issue with heavy horse/fast ponies skeletons in vanilla M2TW when they started running/charging, this can be fixed by adding a scale modifier to their skeleton entries and then regenerating the animation files:

type        fs_heavy_horse
scale        1.12
parent        fs_horse

What was going was that these mounts actually shrink to their default 1.0 scale when running as scale is not applied to new animations added in their skeleton entries.

Would any of you be familiar with mount models to know how to fix the "broken leg" display issue of a resized mount model? For camels specifically, which appear fine when stationary, but when they started moving, their hooves become somewhat detached.