Thread: (Request) Optional 1.0 Movement Weight

The only reason why they had that much animation and a slow stopping animation was to simulate the time it takes for the server to recognize when a character came to a complete stop.

If you tried to cast a spell from the moment you let go of your forward key/controller, the spell would cancel because of movement back in 1.0. So you had to wait for the animation to come to a complete stop in order to start your casts. They did away with the animation since the response time was increased in ARR.

That animation does not exist in ARR and won't be added due to the already strained servers at near capacity.

They cannot add new faces to the game for example. So there is no chance of them adding this animation for each race.

Originally Posted by Kerwin

If you tried to cast a spell from the moment you let go of your forward key/controller, the spell would cancel because of movement back in 1.0. So you had to wait for the animation to come to a complete stop in order to start your casts. They did away with the animation since the response time was increased in ARR.

Eh...That's called PING, really. And it's still a problem here. I still have to wait after stopping before I can cast a spell. If I don't, not only do I waste time on it starting, but also on it locking me out of casting anything else with the "Interrupted" sign in my face.

Originally Posted by Kerwin

That animation does not exist in ARR and won't be added due to the already strained servers at near capacity.

That or any other animation have nothing to do with servers. Nothing, zero, nada. All animations, every single one of them, are entirely client-based. The game servers do three things. Receive numbers that correspond to actions, calculates outcomes, sends the outcomes to the players in range. After that, the clients filter that information (for example to hide battle log information where you have it turned off).
Servers do not have anything to do with graphics at any point. They don't need it. It's all calculations. Only numbers. The clients are responsible for animations and it is the client that shows you the "run" animation when you hold the button for running. You can see that when you get disconnected without the connection being (yet) completely broken. You can use all the skills, movement and everything perfectly well, even though you're not even connected to the server anymore. It just won't register as "done" since the server won't learn of you doing it, so if the connection will be recovered, you'll warp back to where you were.

Originally Posted by Kerwin

They cannot add new faces to the game for example. So there is no chance of them adding this animation for each race.

They can add new faces. It's a rumor that was started by people taking things out of context. They can but don't want to add more optional functions (all those nifty bars for eye sizes etc.). They don't want horrid monsters being born out of people that think it's funny to make as deformed a character as possible.

Originally Posted by kikix12

Eh...That's called PING, really.

Not just ping, but also the (in)frequency of server polls. As far as I can tell, you don't tell XIV's servers that your character will "stop moving" (or has "stopped moving"). It simply rechecks your position: if it's changed since the last poll, you're moving. If it hasn't you're not. But, when the server polls around every 200 ms, rather than, say, the 15 ms of World of Warcraft or the around 75 ms of many other AAA online titles, that means you have anywhere from a 1 to 199 millisecond wait before the server accepts that you've stopped moving. Once it's determined that you've stopped moving, it then conveys that state to the client (and this is where ping seemingly impacts us) until the client gives a move order, in which case it'll again wait until next the server tells the client that it's stationary. Ping definitely makes a difference, but it's not as if you're not going to be (seemingly intermittently) interrupting your casts if casting immediately after movement even when under 25 ms; there's first the matter of the polling rate, and XIV's is comparatively infrequent. (Personally, dropping from 140-240 ms ping to 20-35 when the servers relocated to my back yard only seems to have reduced the minimum and maximum delay to the game detecting end of movement; there's still at least as large a swing in those times as was reduced by the reduced ping.)

This wasn't much worse in 1.x, so far as I can remember. What stood as an issue to so many people was that any and all animations locked movement as well, rather than merely being (true) global cooldowns. Plunge's long "animation-lock" now just means that you can't use any oGCDs or GCDs until the animation is complete, annoying seeing as that animation spends an absurdly long time seemingly complete, whereas most animations allow themselves to be clipped during their wind-down. Now just imagine if you couldn't reposition during any part of the animation, including a very slow and hardly noticeable wind-down portion thereof, and you have the 1.x main point of concern. Using a skill at the wrong time guaranteed that you could not dodge; the acceleration involved in movement was scarcely a factor.