Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Dwarves

[Eleazar]

I gotta say, i'm really impressed with these animations.

[Jetrel]

Please don't spread this link around, wesnoth is paying for the bandwidth, not sourceforge:
Link will expire in less than a month.

This is a mac build which should work on PPC/Intel, and also on as low as 10.4

http://www.wesnoth.org/jetrel/Binaries/ ... r43759.zip



@Boucman: I need to "sleep on it" WRT to the current changes, but I'm strongly thinking they were a step in the right direction.


Anyways, a big hope with these animations, since they're all in similar formats, is that we'll add a set of walking and standing animation macros, for only a few common frame lengths (maybe 8, 10, 12 for standing), and then ask that everything, if possible, fit those macros. This wouldn't be just for saurians, this would be for everything. This isn't a call for help, I can do this, I'm just stating the plan.

Help would be providing good naming conventions for the frames in the macros, since we want the macro to be a one-liner where only one "root image name" is specified, and all of the individual 1-12 frame names are expanded automatically.

[Jetrel]

Here, also, are fixes for the NE frames. Really, the spear should be placed with its center of gravity more towards the center-of-gravity of the unit - that was the big thing that bothered me/others about the "paddle spear".

You may want to give these a once-over for pixel-accurate motion of the head and such, I tried to keep the animation from going "out of arc", but it'll be up to you if you find it satisfactory or not. (read: it's late, I'm tired, I don't 100% trust my work there.)

[Sleepwalker]

Eleazar: Thanks.

(maybe 8, 10, 12 for standing)

The bob animations are all 6 frames. My guess is you meant running?

I detected a small bit of "wobbling" of the spear head and of the shading of the arm in a few frames so here's the tweaked version. Think we should be finished now.

Here's some half done running for the ambusher (disregard the weird shadow). If all is fine movement wise this is the way the flanker will run as well. There won't be any problems with center of gravity with these I think. The spellcaster line will probably use the same movement as the skirmisher holding their stave's with both hands.

[Jetrel]

- Yeah, those ambusher ones look great, balance-wise. The shield is a little funny on the front-most frames - I see these shields as being very oval-shaped ones, a bit like zulu shields. They become perhaps a bit too round there. If you need more motion for fluidity, I wouldn't be afraid to have it swing in front of the face momentarily - although I'm not sure you need that.

- Thanks for the bounce-back on the skirmisher, I'll try to get that SE stuff done asap.

- You were right, I mean running. Tiredness strikes.

[Sleepwalker]

For some reason I thought the Flanker had a oval shield while the Ambusher had a more round one. Meh, must have been it's coloring or something. Anyway is this better? Everything's finished with the animation otherwise.

[Sleepwalker]

Death anim... Not too super happy with it. Hope It'll do.

[Zerovirus]

Had to watch it a few times to understand where each body part went. Also, I can't shake the impression that the Ambusher is spinning his spear in his hand as he walks due to the rapidly shifting shading of the spear (copypaste, perhaps?)

[Sleepwalker]

Yesterday was apparently a day of laze and fail. Now lets turn this into a day of win.

Zerovirus you are absolutely correct.

Now this death anim looks much better I think. I removed one in between frame and used the freed up slot as a subtle bounce frame, as its specified there should be only four. So the frame progression for this one should be 1-2-4-3-4 (As the last frame should be the corpse frame).

[Jetrel]

Tomorrow I'll try and get on all the little tweaks. Generally these are looking good - I'm iffy on the face of the corpse frame. The bounce is a neat idea, though, which we might make normal.

The goal for these death animations again, is to have a global, standard frame order we can use for all such small 4-frame death animations - something that automagically slots into a nice macro that expands into not just the death animation but hopefully all those special frame usages.

Not everything will be put into this schema (witness zombies, skeletons, and woses), but we're hoping to put most of the normal, living stuff on it.

[Sleepwalker]

OK, sounds neat. NE Death - now this one I'm happy with

EDIT: Compared to the rest, this was quick and easy - NE augur spellcasting.

[rhyging5]

sorry for what I will say now..... ..........But 4 frames for death animation is a bit poor in my opinion and would be great to have all variety of deaths as possible I think.

[Sleepwalker]

Oh yeah it sure felt like it was a bit small in the number of frames while I was doing these, but it does the job. But I think these are just meant to be quick generic deaths. Longer and more creative alternate death animations is something the community can come up with. Something like the skeleton archers alternate.

[Jetrel]

Yes, being generic is the point.

If we're generic and similar enough across as many such animations as possible, then we can reuse certain animation snippets across many units. This is what we do on the walking-corpse units - half of their death animation is identical for all of the zombies.

For example, if all saurians have roughly the same pose in the first frame of their death animation, it could cycle into an alternate "incinerate" animation. Or "freeze" animation. Et cetera - these single animations could get reused across entire races (or at least most of a race).

[Sleepwalker]

Stuff.

Factory keeps cranking on.