Performance Skills

It would be entirely proper to the game background to have a large number of differentiated dances. (Think: post-catastrophe, multiplication of separated niches, and evolution -- which applies to social memes and languages, on a more accelerated basis than physical evolution.)

Dance served a great many purposes -- any time groups of people moved together, they did so better with dance and music. Whether this was the Spartan phalanx (to lute and lyre), the Frederican battalion (to drum and bugle), the English threshers (to drum and song), the sailing crew (to fiddle and shanty), or the peasant farmers in India (to village songs and hand clappers), dance and music were present. Though the style and patterns all vary, the one 'missing' possibility across the globe is having no dance whatever (the 'null case'). Dancing was a 'martial' skill as well as a social skill -- with the set of dances one knew, determining which classes/sets of society you could move through "like a local". [Ref: Keeping Together In Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, William H. McNeill.]

So letting the community crowdsource local dances -- line dancing, set dancing, the national variations on 'folk' dancing (Appalacian, Balkan, to Zulu) -- makes sense for the backstory too.

Besides, I like the idea of creating room for the role of 'Dancing Master'; but then, I also dearly enjoy Sabatini's Scaramouche.

 

The problem I have with the emote route is that every set of dance steps would have to be hot-keyed. How maybe hot keys will be available?

 

GuildWars (and gw2) had synchronized emotes. So you could have things all line up.

 

I would think syncing would be the responsibility of which ever "server" has the best ping average to everyone involved. Or maybe just whomever is hosting the instance.. but thing about emotes is they're generally short which provides some technical problems if say.. you want to dance to music that lasts for say.. 2 minutes.

So here's an interesting idea that just now popped into my head. I suppose it kind of plays off the "idle playlist" idea from months back..

The challenge with the emote approach is being able to dance for a period of time and have it appear smooth and continuous for however long you want. So what if we had some kind of emote playlist feature? Where you basically assign a list of emotes in whatever order you wanted. Then rather than activating just one emote you do the playlist instead.

Assuming you had enough 'emotes' and assuming they could be smoothing played one after another.. players would have a lot of freedom to be creative and could design a variety of dances from a simple dance step to a 5 minute sequence.

You could of course interrupt the sequence manually by moving or being attacked etc..

Though personally what I'm most interested in is pairs.. dancing with 1 partner. I still favor the idea I proprose earlier in the thread in this regard. I think dancing would be most fun when it's more interactive.

 

I would really really rather that any dance I needed to do was a single emote, probably time synced with any other dancing player that I had targeted.

 

Which ever method is used I think the majority will just be happy if A: It works well.. and B: there's plenty of variety. But until we find out I'll keep gunning for either the interactive or playlist approach (with proper syncing of course).

 

By the way, first things to come to mind when I read "Perfomance skills" was instrument skills (with checks, yeah, and fails, of course), sheet music (macroed and somehow synched agains lag), street musicians and instrument cases / hats filled with coins / apples/ salted fish / dryed meat / feces / what ever junk other players decide to thow in.

 

Maybe they use the deck building system like we use for combat to build and organize dance moves?

 

They did say that the sheet music has the ability to synchronize the playing of instruments across multiple players. It eliminates the lag element when playing music in a jam session. Each player using the same sheet music causes all the sound to play at once for everybody listening rather than waiting for each person to send notes from their client to the host. Something similar can be used for dancing possibly.

 

or in other words you have a set sequence of animations fully loaded on all viewer's/participant's clients first.. then the server presses the 'play button' so to speak.

 

yeah. It may ruin the human interaction element, but unfortunately it's not going to be possible to have a syncronized dance team in an online game with our current technology. Lag will ruin it.

However even with such a system they would still have to practice the timing and starting locations to begin the dance etc etc. Also this would open up a huge creative element for the person or people involved in writing the sequence of dance moves for all members of the performance.

 

I don't care if none of these features make it to Episode 1. Dancing juggling, pupettering.. They are getting stretched thin as it is for the amount of features going in. None of these have any real big pay-offs except for possibly in a pure RP community. If they took the focus off a lot of features players are interested in (as in, all the stretch goals) and instead focused entirely on adding things in for role-playing any situation then you might have something there.

I'll bet ya 5 coppers these features wont make it for Episode 1 The way things are looking now.. it'll be tough to get the promised features in.

 

You're probably right. Yet I do think we will see it in some form. I can think of a few big payoffs for having entertaining public performances in an online game.

 

only 5 copper? I'd bet 100 gold (in game currency just to be clear) we wouldn't likely see any of this in EP1. I think it's better to bring up ideas while they're fresh in your mind than to wait for what you might percieve as good timing. Now what was that awesome idea I had last year?

At least this way it's in the forum and a dev who likes the concept might put it on a list for looking at later on. Trust me I hold no expectations for new ideas making it into EP1.. especially if they're mine.

 

It could just be done with emotes (teachable), with 1 emote being whole dance or brake it up on start, chrus, 2nd part, chorus etc. When you ask someone to dance, they will be promted "would you like to dance, yes/no" the one that asks handles the emote or emote string. If its timing matter and we have some people that cant "twitch" it, just give us blank boxes where ou drag the emotes and "plan" the dance, hit play. converse, enjoy.

EDIT: if the other party hasent being tought the emote 1.ingore and go with the lead. 2 option. animate "stumble" & dance is over or something. I would prefer dances to be series of emotes chained before you begin. Then theres variation on the oerder of the moves and you can fall to "chorus" move more or not. Would be good.

 

Crazy thought perhaps.. but what if it were treated like PvP w/ card combat? Rather than combat moves/spells etc you get dance moves. I suppose the problem would be what happens between special moves but at least it would be based on an already existing system in the game.