Claire Ryan's Blog, page 12

Archery Level: Godlike

Okay, we’ve all seen Legolas do some pretty crazy shit, alright? Well, trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Meet Lars Anderson, a Danish archer who apparently went back through a lot of old manuscripts, started with the notion that everything in them (even the stuff that modern archers said was impossible) was totally true and not just invented to make a guy look good, and then trained for years. This is the result.

Combat Archery.

This is just a reminder that, sometimes, reality is so much more AWESOME than anything we imagined for our books. That sometimes the myths are true, and legend is not hyperbole.

This Friday just got excellent. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go buy a bow.

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Video Games Swordfighting Fun

You know, I spend a lot of time talking about movie swordplay, but do you know what’s really awesome? Video game swordfighting. For pure silliness, you just can’t beat the balls-out crazy that usually goes into game combat. Movies can get away with their silliness because of the requirements of story and characterization and all that, but games? Oh man, they’re on another level. There is almost nothing about video game swordplay that makes sense from the perspective of true swordplay.

Most of it comes down to the requirements of actual gameplay. Games are not generally played by actual swordfighters, so there’s a lot of simplification going on. Games are limited by the technology, so it’s like sparring with a particularly dumb opponent that only follows a handful of rules and you have only a couple of moves at your disposal – unless you’re on a Wii, of course, which means you can actually pretend you’re swinging a sword. (You’ll still look like an idiot though.) The aim is really to make swordplay fun and accessible and possible with a little rinky-dink controller, not to make it realistic.

In another way, the excessive silliness we see in video game swordplay is a direct result of the technology not having the same limits as physical people with swords. Hence, we get the absolute insanity of impossible weapons that could never be lifted, let alone wielded, mid-air pinwheeling, hitting five opponents at once, and other offenses against good taste and the laws of physics.

See, in live action movies you still need to deal with physics, but in video games, you basically get to make up your own rules. This is why there will likely never be a live action Final Fantasy movie, folks. Even with the best physical special effects, there’s no way you’re getting the Buster Sword on-screen as a physical object unless you make it out of foam.

Anyway – one thing that kinda bugs me about video game swordplay is that it’s suffering from the same issues as Hollywood swordplay – it’s all the same. Take a look at these games:

 

Notice anything?

They all look… remarkably similar, once you get past the differences in style. The player fights multiple opponents, in which you’re dodging or moving in one direction. Highly flashy skills are used, with the usual ridiculous baseball bat flailing going on. The player can hit multiple opponents at once and generally breaks all the laws of physics while doing so. It feels absolutely, totally unrealistic and it’s about as threatening as clipping your nails. Spinning like an Olympic ice-skater on too much coffee is apparently essential. The enemies stand back and take turns at making attacks.

Now these are ostensibly very different games, but their representation of swordplay could be transplanted wholesale into any one of them with no effect on the rest of the game. And that’s just boring, after a while. The combat is frequently the big selling point of these games as well, so you’d think they’d do something more interesting with them. The thing is, there are far, far too many games (good and bad) that default to this kind of gameplay while adding nothing much to it – God of War and Heavenly Sword come to mind.

But are they fun?

Well, your mileage may vary. I do love some hack ‘n’ slash in my video games, but I often found that combat just got tedious as hell after a while – and if that was the whole point of the game, I inevitably stopped playing it. It was the games that did something new, or interesting, that kept my attention – like the original Assassin’s Creed, for example, where the swordplay was slow and visceral and definitely not the point of the game. Games like Skyrim stand out as well simply because first person fighting feels so much more personal, and satisfying.

It’s almost gotten to the stage where swordplay in games has ground itself into a rut, and only one or two mainstream titles are really trying to break the stereotype. I will say this much, though – hats off to fighting games like Soul Caliber. They’re still all kinds of silly, but at least they mix it up and give the characters different styles.

Related Posts:

The Swordplay of Legend of Zelda
Let’s talk about sword weight!
A video on strength in swordplay
Lightsaber Ballet
On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords

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In honour of Martin Luther King Day

I meant to post this yesterday! Still, better late than never. As the man himself said:

The time is always right to do what’s right.

 

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Let’s talk about sword weight!

This is my longsword.

It’s 51 inches long, 38-inch blade. Leather wrapped hilt, scent-stopper pommel, unusual triple fuller. It’s loosely based on the 15th century Oakeshott Type XVIIIb longsword, so it’s basically a regular hand-and-a-half sword with an extra long hilt. Made by Szymon Chlebowski, a very talented Polish swordsmith. (It does not have a name, and I refuse to give it one, so don’t ask!)

It’s about 3.5lbs, and that puts it on the HEAVY side for a longsword.

First of all – yes, it is possible to hold it out straight in one hand. I do it all the time! But you can’ t do it for longer than a minute before your arm starts burning like it’s been dunked in lava. 3.5lbs doesn’t seem like a lot, but holding it out like that is hard! It puts a huge strain on your bicep and forearm.

A 16th century Italian rapier is about 2.2lbs, and you have to hold that out for long periods of time in the various guards in one hand. I guarantee that your arm will start hurting like hell after just a few seconds if you’re not used to that. I know mine was when I practiced with a rapier.

I’ve also used a much bigger longsword than this one. My other weapon of choice is a greatsword – a proper two-hander that weighs about 4.5lbs. and almost comes up to my shoulder. I can hold that out in one hand for, oh, maybe ten seconds.

Movie replica swords though…

See, much as I’d love a copy of Aragorn’s sword from LOTR, it’s literally not possible to get one that’s functional because they’re too big and too damn heavy! United Cutlery makes the officially licensed versions from the movies, and even if they could be used in combat (they can’t, they’re all stainless steel) they are far, far too heavy.

Take a look at this , for example. It’s an inch longer than my sword, and it’s over 5lbs! I couldn’t wield it, and I’ve been doing longsword practice for almost a year.

Gandalf’s sword, Glamdring, a little lighter but still way too heavy at 4lb 9oz.

How about from A Game of Thrones? That’s about the size of the greatsword I’ve used frequently, and it’s almost TWICE the weight.

Okay, okay, these are replicas. Not meant to be real swords, etc. But dayum… swords do not have to be this heavy, and I keep seeing the myth of the very heavy longsword popping up in movies and books. Most swords were light, guys. They HAD to be, if you’re going into combat with them all day.

I mean, just think about it.

Why should a sword be heavy? Medieval swordsmiths were not stupid, and by all accounts they were making some really fantastically good steel. So the blades were hella strong even if they were light. That fuller I described earlier (which is the groove down the middle of the blade) isn’t just for show! It makes the blade much stronger and more rigid without needing extra material. The crossguard is thin, because it’s also made of good, light steel.

Take a look at these zweihanders – some of the biggest swords ever made for actual combat use, so big that they were more like polearms than swords.

“Zweihaender im historischen Museum Basel” Original uploader: Christoph Bracher – Transferred from de.wikipedia(Original text : selbst fotografiert). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Notice how thin they are, how they seem almost delicate. These are the real deal, believe me, and they’d kill an opponent very effectively. The idea of a longsword, or a greatsword, being this huge, lumbering tree-trunk-shaped hunk of metal is silly. Swords were never made like that because they never needed to be, and it was much more practical for a 6ft tall human to have a lighter sword.

I mean, you can’t scale up the physics of effective swordplay and still expect it to work. It just doesn’t. There are rules about how much strength you need to accelerate mass through space while still maintaining enough friction not to fall over. Once again, Skallagrim did a great video on the math involved using the Buster Sword from Final Fantasy as an example, and the verdict was that it was flat out impossible to move a sword that big! The worst part is you’d still likely die to someone wielding a normal sword of normal weight, because, all else being equal, a bigger, heavier sword is going to move slower. That is a huge, insurmountable handicap in a fight to the death.

As a longsword fighter, this has to be in the top ten things that annoy me. Fighting with big swords was not like fighting with metal fence posts, people. Quit putting big dumb swords in your books and movies!

(Rant over, sorry :P)

Related Posts:

On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords
Syrio Forel vs. The Lannister Guards
A video on strength in swordplay
Lightsaber Ballet
The Swordplay of Legend of Zelda

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A video on strength in swordplay

Take a look at this – something to think about when you’re writing about swordwielders Long story short, swordplay requires a certain amount of basic strength, but after that, swordplay requires skill and dexterity.

Skallagrim has an enormous number of really useful videos on swordplay that should be required watching for fantasy authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cNO6...

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On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords
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Exotic Ebook Formatting

You may have noticed that I finally got my act together and cleaned up the website. My friend Fay was nice enough to lend me one of her themes! I did some edits on it, and I think it came out okay. Being a web designer, my site is always a work in progress.

Anyway – today I’d like to talk about something vaguely related to this – exotic ebook formatting. You can do so much with an ebook! It’s not just limited to chapters, table of contents, that kind of thing. There’s a whole world of things you can add – though it’s really not for the faint-hearted, because this stuff is very temperamental.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do with an ebook is make it look consistent. Does that sound odd? The big problem is making the Kindle version look like the epub look like the PDF or whatever other format you choose. Bonus points if you need to also make it look as close to the print version as possible, and believe me, that’s a whole other level of tricky!

I’ve found that, like I’ve said before, Scrivener can’t handle exotic ebook formatting. It produces an ebook that’s got line by line formatting, and this means the file isn’t always internally consistent, never mind consistent across different devices. The solution? Sigil, and format control using stylesheets.

Fine-grained control is mandatory if you really want to knock it out of the park. Adding custom fonts, for example, is really easy in Sigil, because they’re embedded like you’d do on a webpage and the font styles are applied using CSS classes. In Scrivener, you just can’t apply styles using classes. Likewise with tables – I spent hours chasing my tail in Scrivener, trying to make it understand how I wanted it to handle tabular data, only to swap to Sigil and have it work out of the box.

Images! Good grief, adding images is painful sometimes. It’s not so much adding them – it’s getting them to show up in a reflowable way that adjusts them to the screen size. There’s a reason why comics are not turned into ebooks, and it’s all to do with comics just… not being all that adjustable the way that text is.

And then we get into encoding errors…

Not gonna lie, I could write a book (hah!) on how to format a book. Authors, take note – if you want something really interesting in your ebook, then a real formatting expert is worth their weight in gold. If you ever want to distinguish such an expert from someone who’s just using an automated process, then ask them what tools they use to create the ebook!

Readers, if you find something odd in an ebook… don’t be mad! Tell the author or the publisher, but it might not be something they can fix at the drop of a hat. It may not be anything they can fix at all. It might not be something they’re even aware of, if they couldn’t check the formatting on a device like yours.

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Lightsaber Ballet

Yes, lightsaber ballet, people. Watch this video first.

I have a particular dislike for the Star Wars prequels. Honestly, I remember sitting in the cinema, my head full of stories that my dad had told me of what it was like to see the original Star Wars – how much he had loved it, how it had completely blown him away because it was so incredible and new and just… revolutionary. And then I remember being so horribly disappointed that I wanted to find George Lucas and slap him with a copy of Screenwriting for Dummies.

This is part of the reason why. Just LOOK at this fight! It’s all spinning and flash and there is NOTHING about the swordplay that says anything about the characters, or the plot. Even when Dooku takes out a curved handle saber and holds it in such a way that maybe, just maybe, I thought we’d get to see something new – a style of fighting that distinguishes him and sets him apart from the Jedi, that informs you as to what kind of man he is – No. We get the same whirling stupidity.

And then there’s Yoda.

You know what I really hate about this? Yoda should never, ever have lowered himself to fighting with a saber. It’s clear from the fight that Dooku is no match for him in the Force – so why would he even take out a lightsaber?! He’s a Jedi Master! He could have flattened the Sith if he felt like it! It’s clear that mastery of the Force is so much more powerful than mere swordfighting that Yoda should have laughed – LAUGHED, I tell you – at Dooku when he drew his saber.

But he doesn’t and then they go into more completely irrelevant whirling stupidity.

AND ANOTHER THING

Why didn’t Obi-wan help Yoda stop the big metal thing falling on them?! We’ve already established that the Force is something beyond the physical, so him being sliced on the leg and arm wouldn’t stop him using it GAAAAAH I DON’T EVEN.

Bah!

The swordplay irritates me the most, but it’s not like the prequels are short on massive, glaring flaws anyway. So here you have it, people – a prime example of how to do movie swordplay incredibly, awfully wrong. Not because it’s unrealistic, not because it’s too flashy, not even because it’s being done with silly weapons – but because it’s meaningless AND it interferes with characterization and plot.

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The Swordplay of Legend of Zelda
On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords
Interested in swords and bows?
Drizzt Do’Urden and the Infamous Parry

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Your ebooks can track you

As you may know, I’m sometimes a web developer as well as being a writer/swordfighter. Being a dev means knowing all kinds of random stuff about what makes the Internet tick, and incidentally, it also lets me understand a few things about ebooks.

Ebooks can track the stuff you do when you read them.
No, really!

Okay, so there’s this format called ePub, right? Most of the big retailers either use this format or a variant of it, with the exception of Amazon (the Kindle format is based on Mobipocket). ePub is a free, open standard that uses XHTML and a subset of the most common CSS rules that web developers and designers know inside out.

Tech stuff. Long story short, ebook formatting is a LOT like a modified version of what we do to webpages. And the current iteration of the epub format has something pretty awesome – no, not DRM (blech). It includes support for scripting, specifically Javascript. Web devs LOVE Javascript.

We can do all kinds of frankly silly things with Javascript. Effects, animations, interactivity – you ever wonder how interactive ebooks were going to happen? This is how. But JS can also do some incredible stuff that you’ll never see. At its heart, it’s still a dynamic language that can respond to user input and do things with it. Ebooks without scripting? They’re static, and only display information.

So one of Javascript’s more interesting features is that it can send and receive information behind the scenes. In a webpage, JS is used by lots of big companies to handle tracking and analytics. In an ePub3-formatted ebook, on a device that’s connected to the Internet, in an application that doesn’t explicitly block such connections, Javascript can be used in exactly the same way.

So what can it send? Well, anything that’s related to the ebook, more or less. The point at which you’re reading it. When you started it and how long you’ve been reading it for. The speed at which you read. It also sends the usual info associated with an Internet request, like location data – probably down to the country and city, don’t worry. Geotargeting when you don’t have GPS coordinates is a very fuzzy art. If the ebook has interactivity, it can send all kinds of info about how you interacted with it.

This is just off the top of my head, of course.

So there’s a couple of IFs involved here. IF the ebook is epub3, IF the ebook has the right code in it, IF it’s being read in a device that allows it, IF that device is connected to the Internet. Lots of IFs. But the thing is, it definitely works. I tested this myself using Calibre’s desktop ebook reader and a quick test epub3. Shocking, no? Are you worried?

Well – don’t be. Your ebooks can track you. But, by and large, it seems that they don’t.

Amazon don’t support scripting of any kind in their Kindle books. They’ve no need to – any info that an ebook could report back using JS, they’ve already got simply because you’re reading a Kindle ebook in the Kindle app. Kobo supports limited scripting, as does iBooks, but I can’t find a whisper that they do this kind of tracking, probably for the same reason as Amazon – it’s entirely redundant when people use your app. JS tracking inside an ebook would really only be useful for authors and publishers, and surprise surprise – the retailers don’t want to share that info. If they did, then they’d probably open themselves up to privacy-related legal shenanigans.

But, and here’s a big but (hah!), if there was a service out there that DID support JS tracking, you can bet that the smarter publishers and indie authors would be all over it. You could even bet that a new tracking ecosystem would grow up around it, just like what we saw when Internet advertising took off.

Watch this space, my friends. There’s a lot of really intelligent people out there working on this stuff. It’s exciting as hell if you’re on the supply side – but if you’re a reader? Well… better check what e-reader you’re using.

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Free and Useful Apps and Services for Authors

So this came up while I was chatting to a couple of writer-inclined friends, so I thought I’d put together a list of some useful free and not so free apps that I use and have used in the past.

This is specifically for writers and authors – enjoy!

Workflowy

This is what I currently use to outline my books. Each book has its own entry, with individual sub-entries for each chapter, and each chapter broken down into scenes. Then I mark off each scene as completed when it’s done. It’s quick, super-simple, and very easy to modify! Not much by the way of actual functionality, but it doesn’t need much if you’re using it as a convenient to-do list. It’s a web app, so always available through your browser.

Trello

So I’ve tried a lot of different project management apps, and this one is probably the only one that I’ve stuck with. I use it for the ‘meta’ stuff – tasks that have to do with the book production, like what I’m doing with the cover, deadlines and schedules, lists of artists or other contacts, that kind of thing. (Also a web app.)

Evernote

Some people swear by this. I personally found it too cluttered for my taste! That said, Evernote is the gold standard for organization apps, and it’s the most widely available cross-platform solution if you want to be able to keep your writing, notes and project organization all in one place. It’s got iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OSX versions.

Scrivener

Oh, how do I enjoy Scrivener. If you’re a writer, then you want this program. It started off as Mac only and now has Windows and Linux versions, and it’s a godsend for the less technically inclined among us. Scrivener does cost money, and it is worth every cent! Its big advantage over other word processors is that it’s the easiest way to organize a book and then create ebooks with the push of a button. I use it for quick and dirty production or testing.

Sigil

Okay, this one is for the programmers among us. If you want to do more complex ebook features, and Scrivener just isn’t playing nicely, then Sigil is where it’s at. It lets you get down into the code of an ebook and, provided you’ve got the know-how, change the formatting, or insert tables and images, or do all kinds of tricky things that Scrivener can’t do. It is not for the faint-hearted! If you’re not familiar with ebook encoding, then Sigil won’t teach you how to do it, but it’s an amazingly powerful tool in the hands of a tech-y person. It’s also free, open source, and cross-platform compatible.

Focus Writer

This is a new one, and I’ve found that it’s working better for me than I thought. It’s a typical word processor (based on Open Office, I think?) that cuts everything down to the page, the text, and a save function – and a kickass background to get your creative juices flowing.

Dropbox/Google Drive

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure your work is backed up securely. A backup to another hard drive is all well and good, but if you want to really guarantee your work will be safe, then cloud-synced storage is best. This way, your work will still survive even if your computer gets eaten by a T-Rex. It goes without saying that you should organize all the local files related to your work in the cloud storage folder, so any saved changes are immediately backed up and they’re all accessible from other computers if needed.

My Setup

So here’s how I roll:

Fire up the computer.
Start the browser, sign in to Workflowy. This goes on one screen.
Make sure Dropbox is synced.
Open up Focus Writer, and the last thing I was working on. This goes on my other screen.
Check Workflowy for what scenes I need to work on.
WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE
Tea. Relax. Mull over the scene for a few minutes. Talk to my husband about non-book related things.
WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE 
Get frustrated, stop for more tea. Stare at the window.
WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE
Finish the scene.
Go back to Workflowy, cross that one off.
Check Trello for things that need to be updated.
Repeat.

And there you have it. For what it’s worth, trying out new apps and services is a great idea for authors. We all settle into our creative groove in various ways, so experimentation is the only way you’ll figure out what works for you.

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The Swordplay of Legend of Zelda

So, as some of you other gamers may know, Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 is running now. For those of you who DON’T know, it’s basically like the Olympics for video gamers. Look it up on www.gamesdonequick.com if you’re curious. It’s a marathon livestream of gaming speedruns through various popular games.

I’ve been watching it a LOT. Did I mention that I really love video games? I also get a lot of enjoyment of watching other people play games as well, especially speedrunners who play at a truly terrifying level of skill. One of the best runs this year is a run of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – done while blindfolded! Amazing! And it got me thinking about the swordplay that we see in the Legend of Zelda.

Video game weapons are pretty silly overall. Not such a bad thing, of course, as long as they’re appropriate. (Skallagrim did a video a while back on just how good the Master Sword in LoZ is as a weapon, if you’re curious.) So let’s leave that aside for now. Let’s talk a little about the swordplay of Ocarina of Time!

Here’s a pretty good example of Link taking on a mini-boss. You can see most of his moves – the thrust, the somersault, the overhead slash, the spin. Pretty standard silly videogame stuff, right?

Nope, not entirely!

Let’s start with his stance. Slow it down a little, and watch as he shimmies around the boss – his shield is forward, protecting his side, with the sword low and pointing towards the enemy, ready to attack. The thrust is quick and he leans into it, but the shield isn’t pulled back all that far. This is also good defense, and just what you’re taught in sidesword and buckler drills.

His steps off-line – to the left and right – are exactly what you’d expect for a swordfighter. Lead foot first, followed by the other foot, maintaining a good, balanced posture.

The somersault? Exceedingly silly, not possible in real life at that speed, so we’ll say nothing more about that.

The slashes are plain weak. For a fighter who uses a shield, he pulls it back almost behind him in order to slash at the enemy, and that’s a bad move! The overhead slash is easily the worst, he really leaves himself open to getting stabbed with that enormously long wind-up. The spin is just… no, bad Link! Don’t turn your back on your opponent unless you want to get a sword stuck through it!

All things considered, Link’s use of the Master Sword isn’t all that outrageous in comparison to a lot of stuff we see in video games. It’s pretty fast, but the only real grievance is the way he constantly throws the shield back behind him when slashing. It’s not Devil May Cry-level baseball bat swinging shenanigans, for example:

So you’ve gotta give Link props for not being quite as silly as a white-haired anime pretty boy. You can even look at the latest LoZ games and see the same kind of consistency in the swordplay – I took a quick look at Skyward Sword, and it did seem just as tight as Ocarina of Time, if faster.

So there you have it – a completely irrelevant review of the swordplay of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I may do one or two more on video game swordplay – it’s a very different beast to movie swordplay. If anyone would like me to look at a specific movie or video game, just leave a suggestion in the comments!

Related Posts:

On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords
Interested in swords and bows?
Drizzt Do’Urden and the Infamous Parry
The Problem With Lightsabers
Syrio Forel vs. The Lannister Guards

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