Animations and Music in ARR

[Catapult]

So this is all hypothetical.

At some point in the future, SE might implement the Dancer Class. Now this, being a video game, means that we have this thing called background music. (Awesome stuff, if I may say so myself.) And music has a beat.

How cool would it be if a future Dancer Class would have their battle animation appear in time with the game's music of wherever they are located? You could say they would be dancing to the rhythm of their world.

What I'd like to know, is if this is something that would be achievable under the ARR engine, or is it simply beyond the design specifications?

[Gokulo]

I think it would be hard to do in general.

[Polive]

Problems would be the number of assets dedicated for one job. For every background music in a zone that you could feasibly fight in, the dancer would need a unique dance. What about leves? They change the background music, does the dancer need all new dances for leve music as well? Plus, some of the major boss fights have really dramatic music that does not really have a particular beat that you could dance to. I think all of these issues combined would make implementation highly unfeasible.

[Catapult]

Problems would be the number of assets dedicated for one job. For every background music in a zone that you could feasibly fight in, the dancer would need a unique dance. What about leves? They change the background music, does the dancer need all new dances for leve music as well? Plus, some of the major boss fights have really dramatic music that does not really have a particular beat that you could dance to. I think all of these issues combined would make implementation highly unfeasible.

Weeeell, you might recall that at several points during v1.x, they sped up various animations, notably for gathering and crafting, so they have the capability to adjust in some capacity at least. I just don't know if it is a server-side or client-side thing and to what extent they have control over it.

So if you could theoretically set the animation to an adjustable speed with the graphics engine, you could align that to a beats-per-minute identifier within the music track playing and hey-presto: instant animation in time with music.

Of course, that relies upon the graphics engine accommodating such an animation speed adjustment while the game is running.

I'm wondering if it might even be possible in a custom UI mod.