[mainline] Defensive combat sounds

[WhiteWolf]

Hi,

I haven't seen this posted yet, if it has been already, sorry for the duplicate post.
What makes me wonder is how it comes that units in Wesnoth during combat either evade, or suffer damage. In most games, weapons are not only used for attacking, but also for parrying. Parrying exists in Wesnoth in a strange way, and I haven't seen it anywhere in mainline yet.
But most units have shields, or deflective weapons in their sprites, AND, most of the defend animations show a defensive move, not an evasive move.

The sounds are absolutely not consistent with these animations, as we only have hit, and miss.

Why not have some defensive sounds, like a sword hitting a shield, a spear slipping on armour, or anything like that? I know sounds are hard to come by, but surely there is a way to acquire these. Then sprites could be synchronised with sounds in a better way. If a unit evades in its animation, use existing sounds, if it defends or parries in its animation, use a corresponding sound effect.

What do you think?
WhiteWolf

[zookeeper]

It'd be a huge amount of work for relatively little gain, and it's not even clear how exactly it should work. I'm open to realistic concrete proposals which have some kind of clear estimate of what it would require.

[Eagle_11]

You can already configure an unit's defense anim to filter for attack type, range, name , if hits, etc. So if you want to have different sounds for parry and shield block can implement that way.
if im not mistaken, the parry= key is simply -cth% to opponent when that weapon gets used on defense. it goes into an [attack]

[Vyncyn]

The easiest way I can think of would be like this:
-add another definition to the unit files (something like parrying_type= dodge or parrying_type= parry, default would be dodge)
-have the attack animation in the cgf files play a different sound on "miss", depending on the defending units parrying type

This way you wouldn't have to edit all units. Since there would be a default for parrying_type it wouldn't create any errors if it's not added to all units. Also not every attack animation would have to be edited. For example magical attacks (like fireball) could stay as they are with "hit" and "fail to cast" sounds and wouldn't depend on parrying_type.

The main problem is to add "parrying_type" to the games program (so the attack animation would recognice the parrying_type of the defender). Additional sounds can be added later on and the attack animations in the cgf files could be edited one at a time.

[WhiteWolf]

Eagle11: Of course it can be created in UMC, but I'm talking about mainline

Vyncyn: I agree, such a filter would save time, but I fail to see how it would work.
Random sounds are currently solved through {SOUND_LIST:} macros, and as far as I know the sound is determined by the attacker's weapon, regardless of the defender. I'm not so sure that it would be that easy to make the engine combine the fight factors from the attacker and the defender as well. (Since parry_type is surely a factor from the defender).

What I would imagine is to also add another filter to attack animations: hits=parry. Just another tag, with a different {SOUND_LIST:} macro for sounds.
Then, the parry_type=dodge/parry in the defender would determine whether the attack animations would trigger the hits=miss (regural dodging as is now) or the hits=parry animations upon failing to hit the defender.


So basically it would save the hard work concerning rewriting lots of units, but introduces lots of other hard work.
I think it would be worth it, but it's still just an idea