Instant Cast

[tomfrankly]

I've been waiting and waiting and searching and searching for at least a year, hoping to see some one doing this (I even attempted it myself), but the time has now come for a formal request.

 

I'd like for spells to cast as soon as the button is pressed, rather than waiting for the casting animation to play. They could have a 3/4 second delay after the cast to compensate, or not. For me at least, this would actually make me want to play Oblivion again.

 

I'm excited to see what kind of replies this gets.

[LoginToDownload]

I've got an idea of how to do it that would work fine for On Target spells, though it would require trigonometry (and thus OBSE). It would cause a brief but noticable framerate stutter whenever you change spells, though. It also might or might not be difficult to register the player as the caster of On Touch spells (as well as faster On Target effects like Shock Damage), depending on how some tests turn out. Is that okay?

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Didn't he mean instant spells like... without the casting time/animation?

 

Because I think that that's hardcoded... Or? Other than that you can always change the projectile speed for almost instant hits.

[LoginToDownload]

My plan was casting it via an activator when the player presses a certain key. Making the animation super-quick would likely be a lot simpler, though.

[Vagrant0]

My plan was casting it via an activator when the player presses a certain key. Making the animation super-quick would likely be a lot simpler, though.

The ultimate problem with that is that although activators can cast several spells very quickly, it still ends up being about the same amount of time for a single spell once all the scripting, positioning, and trigonometry are done and over with. You would honestly be better off just replacing the casting animations with shortened versions... But that would also likely mean that everyone else has instant spells too.

[tomfrankly]

To clarify: all I want is for the spell to cast as soon as the button is pressed. For example,

 

How it is now: button press, animation begins, spell is cast, animation ends

 

How I want it: button press, spell is cast, slight delay (or not)

 

 

I tried messing with animations in nifskope but either it doesn't have this capability or I was doing it wrong.

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

The thing is that I tried to shorten the animations - didn't help much. My hand just jumped into the casting position(0.01 sec anim) and was stuck there until the spell was cast.

 

Then again I only shortened the 1st person animations, so that might've been the problem.

 

But that's basically why I claimed that they're hardcoded. I'll try experimenting some more.

 

Another thing. I think that a strange but working way to go around all these things is to simply create a wand mesh, make it a short sword, set the damage to 0, speed to super fast, give it a super huge reach and use OBSE to enchant it with the currently equipped spell. The drawback would be that you wouldn't gain experience from casting spells this way. Unless you can do that with OBSE as well.

[tomfrankly]

The thing is that I tried to shorten the animations - didn't help much. My hand just jumped into the casting position(0.01 sec anim) and was stuck there until the spell was cast.

 

Then again I only shortened the 1st person animations, so that might've been the problem.

 

But that's basically why I claimed that they're hardcoded. I'll try experimenting some more.

 

Another thing. I think that a strange but working way to go around all these things is to simply create a wand mesh, make it a short sword, set the damage to 0, speed to super fast, give it a super huge reach and use OBSE to enchant it with the currently equipped spell. The drawback would be that you wouldn't gain experience from casting spells this way. Unless you can do that with OBSE as well.

 

That's a very interesting idea.

[gdarknight]

An interesting thing you can do with OBSE is change the spell to an ability after the first cast. This will allow a "machine gun" type cast as long as the button is held down. The only glitch with this is that the spells still originate from the coordinates of where your extended hand should be, and appear from empty space.

 

Other than the visual glitch, it's really awesome! :devil: