I didn’t arbitrarily choose the gravities, by any means. I also did not choose them because of what I was comfortable with. Different gravity values come with different pros and cons. First, a definite con. When you set the gravity value lower it becomes objectively more difficult to stay close to the ground. I’ll touch upon this later, but we all know that you can only generate momentum via solid objects. Most often, this is the ground. In other words, you’ll have more dead hangtime in wushu than you will in lenshu. I feel that something like this is taken as obvious. Along the same strand, the lower you go with gravity the harder it is to intentionally stay in one place to position yourself. It takes less and less force in lower gravities to send yourself airborne when touching the ground, so attempting to use the ground to simply rotate yourself has a high probability of sending you sky high instead. The trade off with that is, you can move farther with a single bound. An experienced player in a low gravity mod can make extremely quick comebacks, while they may have less control over the direction they are going and over when and where they stop than they would had they been in higher gravity. This needs to be balanced evenly. It tends to come down to personal preference, but I think the two current mods that balance this fairly well are lenshu3ng.tbm and rk-mma. Personally, I’m more of a lenshu fanatic, but the introduction of a lattice requires a little bit of a bouncier gravity, anyway.

I’ve noticed, as I’m sure many others have, that lower turnframes include a larger possibility for reaction to your opponent and acute movements and positioning. It’s my opinion that mods with large turnframes have no place in the competitive repertoire, and I would intend for this to be a competitive mod. However, you also need to consider what you can get done in a certain amount of frames. Setting turnframes to 1 would be useless and tiring for the players participating, simply because you don’t move very much in such a small number of frames. A turnframes value of 25-30 remains competitive and allows for acute actions, such as blocking and striking, while still allowing for significant motions and actions within a single turn.

I entirely believe that touching the ground in striking mods should not be harshly punished. The objective isn’t to make your opponent touch the ground, the objective is to get points. Any inclusion of dq should be entirely secondary, in any striking mod. To me, disqualification looks like something added to unnecessarily raise the skillfloor. It seems like it was thrown in to weed out people who can't stay on their feet (/hands). That seems silly and just annoying to me. It has never been hard for me to keep from dq'ing, but that doesn't mean I stand behind it. I'd really like to be able to rotate on my knees to execute kicks and backhands, because knees seem perfectly suited for rotating on. Disqualification isn't relevant to striking, except in the sense that it decreases the possibility for doing so. Honestly, I'd be okay with making certain joints dq resistant, but I do not like dq as prevalent as it is. Some suggestions for joints to make dq resistant are: Knees, elbows, pecs.

On a sidenote, I find it fairly ironic that the ground is both our saviour and our reaper.

Dismemberments are a tricky issue. Rather than rewarding your opponent (in points) for a well placed or powerful strike, they punish you (by decreasing the mobility and functionality of your tori, or by causing you to dq when it is enabled). A dismemberment can be a game changer. I don’t think that dismemberments should be easy to come by, by any means, but I do think they should be included. Sometimes, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to execute a monster strike that damages your opponent. In real life, after all, there is no points system. Strikes are actually meant to damage the opponent. The only problem I see, is where we would draw the line. Personally, I’m partial to aikidobigdojo.tbm’s dm threshold of 325. I don’t know what to think about fracs, so that would be up in the air as well.

Running tends to be something that many people cry about when they hear striking mods mentioned. It’s absolutely notorious. Some of you may think it isn’t much of an issue, but some sort of corrections should be taken to alleviate it, if only a small amount. One of the simplest ways to do this is by changing dojo size. A smaller dojo size brings along less space to run around in, and allows for more contacts between opponents. Once upon a time, I did a small experiment with some buddies of mine in which I altered the gamerules for lenshu3ng.tbm - I lowered the dq timeout, raised the dm threshold, added fracs, and cut the dojo size by a lot, and everyone said they liked it more than typical lenshu (granted, I had only four or so people in the room). The smaller dojo decreases the amount of dead time in which two players are separated, because they know they have less space to work with. Obviously, there’s a point where it’s impossible to move around without the prospect of falling out of the ring breathing down your neck... I personally wouldn’t want to go lower than 400, but I gave a rather large range in the paragraph where I initially introduced the would-be aspects of the mod, so I don’t really know where I want to balance this at.

Also...

I like dojos, but not because they dq you if fall outside of them. I like them because you know they're there. You know how much space you have to work with, and you'll feel less comfortable moving farther away from your opponent because of the ring breathing down your neck. It allows for more contact between you and your opponent. That said, they should not be absolute law. Dq timers outside the ring that allow you a chance to save yourself (but not a long enough timer to allow good players to dick around outside the ring) should be something that are included in most striking mods in my humble opinion. Although... people should totally be punished for being a fucking idiot and jumping sky high and flying out of the ring. That's just dumb.

Rushing is another issue that people really cry about. It pisses some people off to no end and is equally notorious as running is, when thinking of striking mods. Some efforts have been taken to reduce the possibility of this in other mods, like stabjutsu, but other than that you don’t see mod makers really caring. Well, two solutions that I thought of were raising the engagement distance (like in stabjutsu) and lowering the matchframes during the critical frames for rushing, or in this case the first 30-45 frames. Lowering the turnframes to 10 or 15 for the first three turns allows for a greater ability to react to your opponent and counter or block a rush. The only uncertainty I have about this is whether or not altering engagement distance is necessary when making an alteration to turnframes.

If we're going to make striking mods something that can be enjoyed by more people in the community, we have to start early by lowering the skillfloor. I can't tell you how many <blue belts I've seen leave the public lenshu rooms and whatnot because striking mods are too hard for them to get into. If somebody isn't able to play the mod at all while they're still learning, you'll get less and less people able to learn the mod well enough to play it well, and then the community dwindles. By removing unnecessary raises on the skillfloor like disqualification and making it easier for new players to play the mods, we get more experienced players later and a much more diverse and fun community. These aren't even things that would lower the skillcap, either. These are just things that for whatever reason are set in stone, even when they don't need to be.

Now, the most strange addition to the mod: the floating lattice. What kind of purpose could this lattice possibly serve? Well, think of how you generate momentum... You generate momentum via other objects, whether that’s the floor or (although most likely not intentionally) your opponent. If you go airborne in rk-mma, you have to wait until gravity carries you back down to the ground in order to actually go anywhere or do anything other than flail like a fish out of water. When you’re in the air, you’re sitting fairly helpless. Everyone knows this, and as a result, we try to stick as close to the ground as possible. This makes fights awfully two dimensional (in the sense that we intentionally traverse the width and length of the dojo, but attempt to keep our height as consistent as possible (close to the ground)). A floating lattice that people could use to kick off of, or swing from (or use to perform any other manner of motion or rotation), could spice up matches and reintroduce height as a tool, instead of an inconvenience. Now, just to show what the lattice could look like, I snatched a screenie from ingame.

Now, obviously, barkido.tbm only has bars circumventing the dojo. This proposed mod would ideally include an aforementioned inner lattice.

I’m sure many people will throw out complaints about the lattice, and hopefully we’ll find ways to resolve those complaints. I’ll address some that I’ve thought of here, and I’d love for more people to point things out.

Personally, my biggest worry is that the lattice would be obtrusive and would make it more difficult to maneuver the camera into positions that allow you a clear view of your tori. I imagine that it would be possible to alter colour and possibly make the lattice semi-transparent (like the ceiling directly above it would be) but I’m no modmaker - I simply don’t know. I also don’t know if it will actually be a problem. None of us could without seeing an example of it.

Isn’t this a waste of time? You mentioned yourself that ceilings are included in wushu3box.tbm
There are a lot of personal problems I’ve had with the ceiling in wushu3box.tbm, and I’ll try to explain them here. First, it’s too high to be practical. You can’t smoothly reintroduce height as a viable tool when you have to go extremely out of your way to utilize it. If one were to manage to overcome that and somehow find a way to efficiently traverse that distance, it’s kinda hard to even... well, see the ceiling. It’s entirely transparent, and you have to rely on your ghost. But, okay. We’ll say that one were to overcome that as well. There is also the issue of trying to use a flat surface that you’re falling away from to effectively kick off of in the direction you want. That’s not very inviting, and more likely than not you’ll go somewhere you don’t want to go due to a lack of foresight.

How does a lattice directly underneath the (considerably lower) ceiling help that? Well, we just solved the height issue by making it lower. The lattice is clearly visible, so that’s solved too. But, most of all, the lattice would help greatly with direction.

You can easily control your direction by kicking off of a bar or by swinging from it. All of these put together, it becomes a lot more useful to try to use height to your advantage.

Wouldn’t something so obtrusive hanging above a match interfere with typical gameplay?
Well... most likely not. As I said earlier, most of us already keep as low to the ground as possible, so we can have easy access to an object we can use to generate momentum. Either way, however, this is already intended to redesign standard gameplay. It’d be silly to play the way you always do and intentionally remain unmindful of a hanging ceiling.

Alright, so it might be effective in establishing height as a tool. So what? How does that benefit a match or make it more exciting?
Objectively speaking, adding another fresh element to gameplay increases the amount of valid options at any given moment, which makes the mod more complex and, dare I say, interesting. Instead of simply coming back at your opponent and protecting the important parts of your body and trying to execute a strike, you have the opportunity to jump into the air, and land a kick by swinging from the lattice. Or, you could jump into the air, kick off the lattice, swing from it and get behind your opponent, then you could kick off the ceiling and strike them. You can do any amount of things with it. It could even help with making comebacks more efficient, due to how the bars can help you control your direction. (See Spoiler: I.e above). Furthermore, you make defensive styles even more obsolete. One would need to set up an extremely solid defense to protect themselves on the side you’re possibly coming from via the ground, and their top-side that you could strike from the air.

Speaking from my own opinion, now, I think it would make really damn cool replays and make the game a lot more fun to play. You mentioned raising the skillcap... I think this mod idea has the possibility of not only having a higher skillcap than what is currently sported by mods, but also has the possibility of lowering the skillfloor beyond that of typical striking mods (one of the reasons traditional striking mods are so unattractive to newer players). The bars provide easy access to comebacks (See Spoiler: I.e. above... again) for newbies to the game that possibly don’t know how to execute comebacks, and they increase the possibilities for experienced players, who have the opportunity to assess a situation and pick the route that will be most effective: be that from the ground or air.

Not only that, it helps contain the match. With the lattice hanging overhead, there wouldn’t be any more extremely unfortunate accidents where you kick off of your opponent and fly halfway across the ring through the air. You could use the lattice to control yourself. Some other people might disagree, but I think disqualification should be a secondary issue for striking mods, as I’ve stated above. I wholeheartedly believe that a dojo should be used to contain a match, not strictly to punish people for accidentally venturing outside of it. The inclusion of this lattice provides people with the opportunity to save themselves from disqualification outside the ring.

Just to throw around an idea... it’s possible to grab the bars in barkido.tbm, and it’s also possible to make certain parts of a tori (or, if you so wish, the entire tori) un-grabbable... just throwing that out there. It could be pretty cool to actually use the bars to pivot and build up momentum for a strike without worrying about falling or slipping off, and if you made the entire opponent tori un-grabbable, you wouldn’t have to worry about a striking match turning into a grappling match.

I didn’t arbitrarily choose the gravities, by any means. I also did not choose them because of what I was comfortable with. Different gravity values come with different pros and cons. First, a definite con. When you set the gravity value lower it becomes objectively more difficult to stay close to the ground. I’ll touch upon this later, but we all know that you can only generate momentum via solid objects. Most often, this is the ground. In other words, you’ll have more dead hangtime in wushu than you will in lenshu. I feel that something like this is taken as obvious. Along the same strand, the lower you go with gravity the harder it is to intentionally stay in one place to position yourself. It takes less and less force in lower gravities to send yourself airborne when touching the ground, so attempting to use the ground to simply rotate yourself has a high probability of sending you sky high instead. The trade off with that is, you can move farther with a single bound. An experienced player in a low gravity mod can make extremely quick comebacks, while they may have less control over the direction they are going and over when and where they stop than they would had they been in higher gravity. This needs to be balanced evenly. It tends to come down to personal preference, but I think the two current mods that balance this fairly well are lenshu3ng.tbm and rk-mma. Personally, I’m more of a lenshu fanatic, but the introduction of a lattice requires a little bit of a bouncier gravity, anyway.

I’ve noticed, as I’m sure many others have, that lower turnframes include a larger possibility for reaction to your opponent and acute movements and positioning. It’s my opinion that mods with large turnframes have no place in the competitive repertoire, and I would intend for this to be a competitive mod. However, you also need to consider what you can get done in a certain amount of frames. Setting turnframes to 1 would be useless and tiring for the players participating, simply because you don’t move very much in such a small number of frames. A turnframes value of 25-30 remains competitive and allows for acute actions, such as blocking and striking, while still allowing for significant motions and actions within a single turn.

I entirely believe that touching the ground in striking mods should not be harshly punished. The objective isn’t to make your opponent touch the ground, the objective is to get points. Any inclusion of dq should be entirely secondary, in any striking mod. To me, disqualification looks like something added to unnecessarily raise the skillfloor. It seems like it was thrown in to weed out people who can't stay on their feet (/hands). That seems silly and just annoying to me. It has never been hard for me to keep from dq'ing, but that doesn't mean I stand behind it. I'd really like to be able to rotate on my knees to execute kicks and backhands, because knees seem perfectly suited for rotating on. Disqualification isn't relevant to striking, except in the sense that it decreases the possibility for doing so. Honestly, I'd be okay with making certain joints dq resistant, but I do not like dq as prevalent as it is. Some suggestions for joints to make dq resistant are: Knees, elbows, pecs.

On a sidenote, I find it fairly ironic that the ground is both our saviour and our reaper.

Dismemberments are a tricky issue. Rather than rewarding your opponent (in points) for a well placed or powerful strike, they punish you (by decreasing the mobility and functionality of your tori, or by causing you to dq when it is enabled). A dismemberment can be a game changer. I don’t think that dismemberments should be easy to come by, by any means, but I do think they should be included. Sometimes, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to execute a monster strike that damages your opponent. In real life, after all, there is no points system. Strikes are actually meant to damage the opponent. The only problem I see, is where we would draw the line. Personally, I’m partial to aikidobigdojo.tbm’s dm threshold of 325. I don’t know what to think about fracs, so that would be up in the air as well.

Running tends to be something that many people cry about when they hear striking mods mentioned. It’s absolutely notorious. Some of you may think it isn’t much of an issue, but some sort of corrections should be taken to alleviate it, if only a small amount. One of the simplest ways to do this is by changing dojo size. A smaller dojo size brings along less space to run around in, and allows for more contacts between opponents. Once upon a time, I did a small experiment with some buddies of mine in which I altered the gamerules for lenshu3ng.tbm - I lowered the dq timeout, raised the dm threshold, added fracs, and cut the dojo size by a lot, and everyone said they liked it more than typical lenshu (granted, I had only four or so people in the room). The smaller dojo decreases the amount of dead time in which two players are separated, because they know they have less space to work with. Obviously, there’s a point where it’s impossible to move around without the prospect of falling out of the ring breathing down your neck... I personally wouldn’t want to go lower than 400, but I gave a rather large range in the paragraph where I initially introduced the would-be aspects of the mod, so I don’t really know where I want to balance this at.

Also...

I like dojos, but not because they dq you if fall outside of them. I like them because you know they're there. You know how much space you have to work with, and you'll feel less comfortable moving farther away from your opponent because of the ring breathing down your neck. It allows for more contact between you and your opponent. That said, they should not be absolute law. Dq timers outside the ring that allow you a chance to save yourself (but not a long enough timer to allow good players to dick around outside the ring) should be something that are included in most striking mods in my humble opinion. Although... people should totally be punished for being a fucking idiot and jumping sky high and flying out of the ring. That's just dumb.

Rushing is another issue that people really cry about. It pisses some people off to no end and is equally notorious as running is, when thinking of striking mods. Some efforts have been taken to reduce the possibility of this in other mods, like stabjutsu, but other than that you don’t see mod makers really caring. Well, two solutions that I thought of were raising the engagement distance (like in stabjutsu) and lowering the matchframes during the critical frames for rushing, or in this case the first 30-45 frames. Lowering the turnframes to 10 or 15 for the first three turns allows for a greater ability to react to your opponent and counter or block a rush. The only uncertainty I have about this is whether or not altering engagement distance is necessary when making an alteration to turnframes.

If we're going to make striking mods something that can be enjoyed by more people in the community, we have to start early by lowering the skillfloor. I can't tell you how many <blue belts I've seen leave the public lenshu rooms and whatnot because striking mods are too hard for them to get into. If somebody isn't able to play the mod at all while they're still learning, you'll get less and less people able to learn the mod well enough to play it well, and then the community dwindles. By removing unnecessary raises on the skillfloor like disqualification and making it easier for new players to play the mods, we get more experienced players later and a much more diverse and fun community. These aren't even things that would lower the skillcap, either. These are just things that for whatever reason are set in stone, even when they don't need to be.

Now, the most strange addition to the mod: the floating lattice. What kind of purpose could this lattice possibly serve? Well, think of how you generate momentum... You generate momentum via other objects, whether that’s the floor or (although most likely not intentionally) your opponent. If you go airborne in rk-mma, you have to wait until gravity carries you back down to the ground in order to actually go anywhere or do anything other than flail like a fish out of water. When you’re in the air, you’re sitting fairly helpless. Everyone knows this, and as a result, we try to stick as close to the ground as possible. This makes fights awfully two dimensional (in the sense that we intentionally traverse the width and length of the dojo, but attempt to keep our height as consistent as possible (close to the ground)). A floating lattice that people could use to kick off of, or swing from (or use to perform any other manner of motion or rotation), could spice up matches and reintroduce height as a tool, instead of an inconvenience. Now, just to show what the lattice could look like, I snatched a screenie from ingame.

Now, obviously, barkido.tbm only has bars circumventing the dojo. This proposed mod would ideally include an aforementioned inner lattice.

I’m sure many people will throw out complaints about the lattice, and hopefully we’ll find ways to resolve those complaints. I’ll address some that I’ve thought of here, and I’d love for more people to point things out.

Personally, my biggest worry is that the lattice would be obtrusive and would make it more difficult to maneuver the camera into positions that allow you a clear view of your tori. I imagine that it would be possible to alter colour and possibly make the lattice semi-transparent (like the ceiling directly above it would be) but I’m no modmaker - I simply don’t know. I also don’t know if it will actually be a problem. None of us could without seeing an example of it.

Isn’t this a waste of time? You mentioned yourself that ceilings are included in wushu3box.tbm
There are a lot of personal problems I’ve had with the ceiling in wushu3box.tbm, and I’ll try to explain them here. First, it’s too high to be practical. You can’t smoothly reintroduce height as a viable tool when you have to go extremely out of your way to utilize it. If one were to manage to overcome that and somehow find a way to efficiently traverse that distance, it’s kinda hard to even... well, see the ceiling. It’s entirely transparent, and you have to rely on your ghost. But, okay. We’ll say that one were to overcome that as well. There is also the issue of trying to use a flat surface that you’re falling away from to effectively kick off of in the direction you want. That’s not very inviting, and more likely than not you’ll go somewhere you don’t want to go due to a lack of foresight.

How does a lattice directly underneath the (considerably lower) ceiling help that? Well, we just solved the height issue by making it lower. The lattice is clearly visible, so that’s solved too. But, most of all, the lattice would help greatly with direction.

You can easily control your direction by kicking off of a bar or by swinging from it. All of these put together, it becomes a lot more useful to try to use height to your advantage.

Wouldn’t something so obtrusive hanging above a match interfere with typical gameplay?
Well... most likely not. As I said earlier, most of us already keep as low to the ground as possible, so we can have easy access to an object we can use to generate momentum. Either way, however, this is already intended to redesign standard gameplay. It’d be silly to play the way you always do and intentionally remain unmindful of a hanging ceiling.

Alright, so it might be effective in establishing height as a tool. So what? How does that benefit a match or make it more exciting?
Objectively speaking, adding another fresh element to gameplay increases the amount of valid options at any given moment, which makes the mod more complex and, dare I say, interesting. Instead of simply coming back at your opponent and protecting the important parts of your body and trying to execute a strike, you have the opportunity to jump into the air, and land a kick by swinging from the lattice. Or, you could jump into the air, kick off the lattice, swing from it and get behind your opponent, then you could kick off the ceiling and strike them. You can do any amount of things with it. It could even help with making comebacks more efficient, due to how the bars can help you control your direction. (See Spoiler: I.e above). Furthermore, you make defensive styles even more obsolete. One would need to set up an extremely solid defense to protect themselves on the side you’re possibly coming from via the ground, and their top-side that you could strike from the air.

Speaking from my own opinion, now, I think it would make really damn cool replays and make the game a lot more fun to play. You mentioned raising the skillcap... I think this mod idea has the possibility of not having a higher skillcap than what is currently sported by mods, but also has the possibility of lowering the skillfloor beyond that of typical striking mods (one of the reasons traditional mods are so unattractive to newer players). The bars provide easy access to comebacks (See Spoiler: I.e. above... again) for newbies to the game that possibly don’t know how to execute comebacks, and they increase the possibilities for experienced players, who have the opportunity to assess a situation and pick the route that will be most effective: be that from the ground or air.

Not only that, it helps contain the match. With the lattice hanging overhead, there wouldn’t be any more extremely unfortunate accidents where you kick off of your opponent and fly halfway across the ring through the air. You could use the lattice to control yourself. Some other people might disagree, but I think disqualification should be a secondary issue for striking mods, as I’ve stated above. I wholeheartedly believe that a dojo should be used to contain a match, not strictly to punish people for accidentally venturing outside of it. The inclusion of this lattice provides people with the opportunity to save themselves from disqualification outside the ring.

Just to throw around an idea... it’s possible to grab the bars in barkido.tbm, and it’s also possible to make certain parts of a tori (or, if you so wish, the entire tori) un-grabbable... just throwing that out there. It could be pretty cool to actually use the bars to pivot and build up momentum for a strike without worrying about falling or slipping off, and if you made the entire opponent tori un-grabbable, you wouldn’t have to worry about a striking match turning into a grappling match.