certain alternate mode abilities block out the use of helminth abilities

[SDGDen]

off the top of my head this affects grendels pulverize and yareli's merulina. in both cases, the frame can cast their OWN abilities but not any helminthed abilities. this means that you have to deactivate the ability to use any subsumed ability. 

this isn't consistent with other alternate modes either.

titania, despite having her razorwing as an alternate mode can still cast helminth abilities in her razorwing form (however, any movement from any helminth abilities will be cancelled out, for example the lunge related to garuda's blood altar) 

hydroid's puddle also still allowed the use of abilities (RIP)

hildryn can use her haven and balefire charger, but not pillage or a subsumed ability while in aegis storm



In my opinion, these frames should all be able to cast helminth abilities during their alternate mode abilities. 

[Aruquae]

13 minutes ago, SDGDen said:

off the top of my head this affects grendels pulverize and yareli's merulina. in both cases, the frame can cast their OWN abilities but not any helminthed abilities. this means that you have to deactivate the ability to use any subsumed ability. 

this isn't consistent with other alternate modes either.

titania, despite having her razorwing as an alternate mode can still cast helminth abilities in her razorwing form (however, any movement from any helminth abilities will be cancelled out, for example the lunge related to garuda's blood altar) 

hydroid's puddle also still allowed the use of abilities (RIP)

hildryn can use her haven and balefire charger, but not pillage or a subsumed ability while in aegis storm



In my opinion, these frames should all be able to cast helminth abilities during their alternate mode abilities. 

Voruna’s fourth also doesn’t work

The reason it doesn’t work is because it would be too odd to make animations while using those abilities. Would probably just look clunky. 
Imagine Yareli doing Nourish while on Merulina. Poor Merulina would just get stomped. Grendel while in a ball also can’t really work. No animations to play while in ball form. It would be fun if he could use blood alter. He can just be a meatball turning enemies into his sauce. 
Edit: Of course everything I just stated is obsolete simply because Titania stuck the middle finger to me

She’s simply built different :)

Edited October 19, 2023 by Malikili
Correction

[ShogunGunshow]

The answer is just to make characters do a generic canned animation instead of a full-body one if they're in a state where the normal animation isn't possible. Like the 'flashing hands out to either side with palms down' animation.

It might look odd with some abilities, but I think almost every player would take 'it looks odd in these extremely specific niche circumstances' to 'it doesn't work at all in those niche circumstances.' 

[AntifreezeUnder0]

34 minutes ago, Malikili said:

Grendel while in a ball also can’t really work

Well grendel himself is an answer. They changed and had no problems that grendel in ball form can cast feast, and nourish, and regurgitate, all 3 abilities(albeit hi own) are 3 different body animations, but work while he is in constant other (ball form) animation.

But i wish they replaced nourish with pulverize, in helminth. Why not have mini titania ball attacking enemies!

[SDGDen]

35 minutes ago, Malikili said:

Voruna’s fourth also doesn’t work

The reason it doesn’t work is because it would be too odd to make animations while using those abilities. Would probably just look clunky. 
Imagine Yareli doing Nourish while on Merulina. Poor Merulina would just get stomped. Grendel while in a ball also can’t really work. No animations to play while in ball form. It would be fun if he could use blood alter. He can just be a meatball turning enemies into his sauce. 
Edit: Of course everything I just stated is obsolete simply because Titania stuck the middle finger to me

She’s simply built different :)

hydroid as well, with hydroid the way it was handled is "just dont play the animation". grendel could have the same.

yareli is a bit more difficult but as shogun said, just scrap all the lower-body movement while on merulina or keep the animation from the ability you replaced.

[(PSN)Unstar]

2 hours ago, SDGDen said:

hildryn can use her haven and balefire charger, but not pillage or a subsumed ability while in aegis storm

With respect, I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.  Hildryn was explicitly designed to not be able to use a subset of her own abilities while in Aegis Storm.  This isn't an oversight or a problem that needs fixing, it's a sensible design choice that the devs made when creating her.  And it's a design choice that makes it clear that there is no default expectation that all abilities be usable in all modes.

I think it's worth critiquing whether certain specific combinations of abilities and modes would be "better" if they did work together, but I would suggest against approaching this issue from anything close to the standpoint of "all abilities should always be able to be used", when that clearly isn't the design even among non-Helminthed frames.

[SDGDen]

2 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

With respect, I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.  Hildryn was explicitly designed to not be able to use a subset of her own abilities while in Aegis Storm.  This isn't an oversight or a problem that needs fixing, it's a sensible design choice that the devs made when creating her.  And it's a design choice that makes it clear that there is no default expectation that all abilities be usable in all modes.

I think it's worth critiquing whether certain specific combinations of abilities and modes would be "better" if they did work together, but I would suggest against approaching this issue from anything close to the standpoint of "all abilities should always be able to be used", when that clearly isn't the design even among non-Helminthed frames.

im just naming every frame with an alternate mode and how they handle abilities. im well aware hildryn is that way on purpose. 

im more-so pointing out the inconsistency between frames. like why can titania cast blood altar while in razorwing but yareli can't cast blood altar while on merulina? 

[trst]

IIRC it wasn't just being an animation issue but also being something they didn't want to invest the time into every time a new ability with this issue gets added.

And considering how the game had such a rushed development and how the interaction is already sort of inconsistent it's likely not a small feat to get them all working.

[SDGDen]

2 hours ago, trst said:

IIRC it wasn't just being an animation issue but also being something they didn't want to invest the time into every time a new ability with this issue gets added.

And considering how the game had such a rushed development and how the interaction is already sort of inconsistent it's likely not a small feat to get them all working.

except creating a fallback for this would be quite easy: simply use the animation of the ability that you've overriden. it's better than not being able to cast your helminth ability at all. 

[trst]

5 hours ago, SDGDen said:

except creating a fallback for this would be quite easy: simply use the animation of the ability that you've overriden. it's better than not being able to cast your helminth ability at all. 

That is assuming the way abilities are coded allows for different animations to be assigned to so easily. For all we know they took the route of hardcoding abilities to each have one specific assigned animation and doing that with Helminth abilities means creating four copies per frame for every one of them.

Also it was so easy you'd think that they'd have just done so since this has been an issue pretty much since the system was added. And they just had a major update featuring all the little things they've had piling up.

[SDGDen]

8 hours ago, trst said:

That is assuming the way abilities are coded allows for different animations to be assigned to so easily. For all we know they took the route of hardcoding abilities to each have one specific assigned animation and doing that with Helminth abilities means creating four copies per frame for every one of them.

Also it was so easy you'd think that they'd have just done so since this has been an issue pretty much since the system was added. And they just had a major update featuring all the little things they've had piling up.

i *highly* doubt there's not a way to forcefully override an animation, even if the ability has a hard-coded animation (which is likely considering what i know about how warframe is coded). hard-coded just means that when the ability is cast, it calls for the animation directly instead of calling for the animation system and asking *it* to figure out which animation to play. it's basically just like comparing "1+2" to "1+x, x=2". in the first example 2 is hardcoded, in the second one it's not and you can change X more easily. 

however, that's not how fallbacks work. how a fallback works is it catches some kind of exception (like an error) and reacts to it. so the logic here would be:

>cast the ability
>the ability's code attempts to call for the correct animation
>in the case the animation fails to play, an exception is thrown.
>the exception triggers the fallback, which calls for an animation, to figure out which animation that would be, it checks which frame you have and which slot you have a subsumed ability on, fetches the animation for it and stores it in a variable. the fallback simply calls for the animation from that variable (so the game only has to check once at the start of every mission which animation it should be using as a fallback)
>if the fallback also fails to play, simply skip playing the animation

this should not even take 100 lines of code and should work with hard-coded animations. 



alternatively: since this issue only affects a small number of frames, they could just check if the player is running that frame with a subsume, catch the castevent of the subsumed ability and replace the animation with a slightly altered one. for grendel they could just... *not* play the animation, since that's how his abilities work in ball mode anyways. for yareli they could take the animation from the subsumed ability and simply remove any data below a specific Y value (so it removes any data relating to the lower body) making it an upper-body cast while on merulina. that one COULD be a bit jank though depending on how their animations are encoded.