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.