The devs are pulling back the new flight animations from I8 until they get a few things cleaned up.
Based on everyone’s feedback about the changes to travel animations (in particular the alternate flight poses and strafing/banking) we’ve decided to push back introducing flight poses for now. We really like them, as did many of you, and we were hoping to get them into the game in conjunction with wings. Unfortunately, we just ran out of time to get everything working the way we really want it to work. So rather than getting it in now as is, making some of you happy and some of you unhappy, we’re going to push
this feature back a bit so we’ll have the time to fully implement what we really want to do. Here’s a rough overview of the things we want to fix before re-introducing these:1) Flight poses should be selectable. That’s our biggest thing to get working before implementing these on live. It’s very obvious from feedback that you guys have very strong feelings about which poses you like/dislike for your characters. Once the animations are selectable (and not randomly or sequentially chosen) we’ll be able to do much nicer transitions from stationary to forward flight.
Interestingly, when this first came up, Positron indicated that making them selectable would be a lot more difficult. I really wouldn’t have minded, to be honest — I can imagine some builds would want to be “standard,” but most flying heroes use a variety of poses.
2) Hover should not use the alternate flight animations. We have a hover forward animation that has never played (it’s the upright position like the current strafe and backward animation that many of you have suggested). There’s a code issue that’s preventing hover from getting the right triggers to play its animation. Instead it uses the flight animations, which in turn causes it to use the alternate flight animations. We agree that it looks silly in most cases. We assure you it wasn’t done
intentionally.3) We need to fix the camera/orientation bug that’s caused by the alternate strafe mode. This currently effects the Kheldian Dwarf and Nova forms on live. Oddly enough, I have a level 50 Peacebringer on live and never noticed it before you guys pointed it out. Now it’s glaringly obvious. Good catch.
4) Along those lines, we want to make a lot of little tweaks to the behavior of the alternate strafing mode. It solves a lot of the animation blending issues with strafing while running, jumping, or flying…but it’s not quite where we’d like for it to be. It’s a lot of little minor things such as adjusting turn speeds, using the strafing animations under the right conditions, adding a bit of roll/banking to the transitions between flying and strafing, etc.
Not quite sure what’s being referenced here, but it sounds like the testing process worked as intended.