Missing Silat Weapons

I’ve noticed some… gaps in the weapon coverage for Silat: Qiang, Copper Spear, Glaive, Naginata, Copper Knife… possibly a Forked Spear as well. All are missing when logically they should be supported.

I agree, and also think you should be able to do fencing with most swords. But others might say that styles need to be limited to only a few weapons so that you need to either hunt for the right weapon or craft it yourself.

I can understand some limitations, for example, it makes sense that the rather oversized Awl Pike doesn’t work for Silat. However, all the weapons I mentioned have extremely similar equivalents in the list of available weapons for the style. Basically every knife including the stone knife is included so Copper Knife should be in there, the Qiang and Copper spear are basically just more shortspears, the Glaive and Naginata, if a bit niche, have their makeshift versions on the list… I can see an argument for the Forked Spear, since it’s more a makeshift Trident, to not be on the list though… but still, the others really should be on the list.

As for Fencing, I think most of the one handed straight swords are on the list already? I haven’t checked in a while, admittedly

Yeah that makes sense then. I think the wiki is out of date but fencing looks like it is very limited(cant use arming sword, or katana). I haven’t tried it in recent versions.

To be fair, Katana aren’t good weapons for Fencing, they’re cutting swords, not stabbing swords.

Also, an observation, I don’t think the ‘bad’ variants(like replicas) of weapons are on the list.

Sabers and schlagers are fencing weapons and they’re both cutting weapons. The katana isn’t a good match for fencing for other reasons, but modern fencing does include teaching people how to slash.

A katana is also supposed to be wielded two handed as well iirc. Which to my knowledge would automatically make it ineligible for fencing given that all the fencing techniques require the use of a one handed weapon.

1 Like

Modern kendo teaches katana as a two-handed weapon, but Niten Ichi Ryu is specifically a two blades at a time school, so it teaches one-handed katana. Some other traditional kenjutsu schools taught katana as a one-handed weapon.

Fencing currently supports broadsword, rapier, cavalry saber, fencing foils, fencing sabers, fencing epees, umbrellas, canes, and cudgels. It should probably also support the cutlass and scimitar, as those are basically variations on the cavalry saber.

Niten Ichi Ryu currently supports katana, wakizashi, bokken, and nodachi. Letting it work with the scimitar, cutlass, and cavalry saber makes sense to me: there are differences between a cutlass and a wakizashi, but you could perform more wakizashi techniques with a cutlass.

1 Like

I believe one can also fence with the forged sword which iirc is probably akin to a smallsword. So I feel like given that breadth it should definitely support the cutlass.

There is an elegant way to handle this problem overall, which would be in keeping with features already in the code. We could make the function which checks the weapon for compatibility with a given martial art also walk up the “tree” of any “copy-from” JSON entries. So that weapons would essentially inherit their status from their parent weapon. It’s a pretty limited iteration and isn’t called often so the performance impact should be minimal. As long as object authors use the copy-from system, it would be transparent and automatic - they wouldn’t even need to know that they were doing it. If we backtrack and edit the existing weapons to inherit then new authors would likely follow along as they learn by copying. Bonus points for creating abstract weapons for it all to sum up into. Of course we could have inherited tags that get checked instead, but that’s a bigger change and an inversion of how things are calculated now (i.e. style->weapon).

I’d volunteer, but I’m still getting my feet under me in terms of the codebase, build system, and a starter project.