Standing and idle animations?

[torangan]

I don't know what you mean by standing funny animations. What's the difference to random animations triggering from time to time? But what you wrote about selected animations is a nice idea. Maybe those should be what was refered to as standing animations so far? A simple, looping, standing animation which is only played if the unit is currently selected to highlight it further.

[kshinji]

Hm, there are many possibliities, and id like to present them here (some are my new ideas)

* looping unselected animations ( bobbing )
* looping selected animations ( selected bobbing )
* random standing animations ( clening the musket fe. )
* random funny standing animations ( hamlet something )
* animations-on-selection ( fe, unit bowing to you from the screen )


Animatiuons on selection shouldnt happen everytime when unit is selected, and should be disabled if user uses accelerated speed or no comabat maybe.

By funny i understand some animations which happen rarely. For example if you have 20 units on screen, half of tyhe time at least one unit should be doing something. But only once per 5-10 minutes one should be doing something funny.

[Stilgar]

I really think we should avoid having rude/gross idling animations (such as, from examples said, scratching butts, licking eyes, burping, or blowing "snot bubbles".) Some groups will find it funny, but to others it's unfunny and possibly a bit offensive. This sort of juvenile humour isn't necessary or beneficial.

On a similar note, I think that care should be taken with "funny" animations in general. Having some could be fun, but if they happen too frequently or don't fit their characters I think they would be bad. For instance, having the Swordsman clown around and drop his weapon on his foot would not suit the character, IMHO. It would be suitable for a character like the Thug. Yes Zhukov, having the goblin fall asleep is rather odd, but I think it's this side of acceptable, if barely, as long as it happens on rare occurences only.

Basically, I don't think having some fun with these is a bad thing, but let's not turn Wesnoth into Cartoon Network. I'd like to think it has some degree of seriousness.

[zookeeper]

I really think we should avoid having rude/gross idling animations (such as, from examples said, scratching butts, licking eyes, burping, or blowing "snot bubbles".) Some groups will find it funny, but to others it's unfunny and possibly a bit offensive. This sort of juvenile humour isn't necessary or beneficial.

Anyone can take offense to anything. Stupid people take offense no harmless things. I'd say let's ignore the stupid people and not restrain ourselves from doing good stuff.

On a similar note, I think that care should be taken with "funny" animations in general. Having some could be fun, but if they happen too frequently or don't fit their characters I think they would be bad. For instance, having the Swordsman clown around and drop his weapon on his foot would not suit the character, IMHO.

I agree, the animations shouldn't overdo it, so we shouldn't have something "too funny" on a unit it doesn't fit...your example is a good one of what I think would overdo it.

[Stilgar]

I really think we should avoid having rude/gross idling animations (such as, from examples said, scratching butts, licking eyes, burping, or blowing "snot bubbles".) Some groups will find it funny, but to others it's unfunny and possibly a bit offensive. This sort of juvenile humour isn't necessary or beneficial.

Anyone can take offense to anything. Stupid people take offense no harmless things. I'd say let's ignore the stupid people and not restrain ourselves from doing good stuff.

[sarcasm] Then let's add blood and gore to Wesnoth while we're at it. If people take offense, well then, they're stupid. [/sarcasm]

Seriously, though, do you think that the four examples I cited are not stupid and would be beneficial to the game?

[Boucman]

I am currently implementing idle animations... should be ready this WE, of not earlier (this is of course, trunk only... no )

just so you know

[Jetrel]

I really think we should avoid having rude/gross idling animations (such as, from examples said, scratching butts, licking eyes, burping, or blowing "snot bubbles".) Some groups will find it funny, but to others it's unfunny and possibly a bit offensive. This sort of juvenile humour isn't necessary or beneficial.

Anyone can take offense to anything. Stupid people take offense no harmless things. I'd say let's ignore the stupid people and not restrain ourselves from doing good stuff.

Rude/gross animations should reflect the nature of the units they come from. Simple things like "an orc scratching himself" are, in fact, good, because they convey the savage and brutish nature of the unit.

There's a simple threshold for stuff like this - something like "blowing snot bubbles" would cross it, and was thus vetoed by me. Just trust me on this - I'm not going to let anyone turn wesnoth into Happy Gilmore.

On a similar note, I think that care should be taken with "funny" animations in general. Having some could be fun, but if they happen too frequently or don't fit their characters I think they would be bad. For instance, having the Swordsman clown around and drop his weapon on his foot would not suit the character, IMHO.

I agree, the animations shouldn't overdo it, so we shouldn't have something "too funny" on a unit it doesn't fit...your example is a good one of what I think would overdo it.

Yep.

[turin]

Another good question is, how often should animations trigger? Should they only play for selected units, or for any unit on the screen? Seems to me that if they play for only the selected unit, they won't really be noticeable, and if they play all the time, the timing would have to be done pretty well to make them not be annoying... just a thought.

[Jetrel]

Another good question is, how often should animations trigger? Should they only play for selected units, or for any unit on the screen? Seems to me that if they play for only the selected unit, they won't really be noticeable, and if they play all the time, the timing would have to be done pretty well to make them not be annoying... just a thought.

ALL UNITS ON THE SCREEN.

We can test to see how often they should happen, but I'm guessing that there should be one every 10-40 seconds. If nothing else, the general question of these being on or off is a worthy candidate for an option.


One of the biggest problems with wesnoth "as it is" is how incredibly static the game looks when it's just sitting there, and no one is moving their troops. If you look at a copy of warcraft 3, with all the units just standing in place, they're very animated, and it looks much more alive; hence better, hence "more professional". The very static nature of the wesnoth game screen is, IMO, one of the biggest things that makes us look very amateur. Even Civ 1 had slight terrain animations (water lapping via a pallette swap, but it was still very potent). We've gotten everything else up to snuff, but this one thing needs some stuff done to fix it. Standing animations should be able to help immensely.

[torangan]

The first implementation should trigger after a delay of 30 seconds plus a random factor of 0-10 seconds. Of course, each unit will have it's own timer so if you don't to anything to reset the timers (select unit, attack it, end turn...) you can expect them to move at rather different times within a couple of minutes.

[kshinji]

Idling animations should appear for each unit after at least 45 seconds of idling and should be repeated about each 15 seconds.

Funny animations should appear whe player is idling for at least 180 seconds, and there should be only one such animations at the time.

BTW, ive got a suggestion: easter egg animations, which should be triggered some funny ways. In StarCraft you could hear special unit voices if you clicked a unit some times in short time. I dunno how shoudl it be done for Wesnoth, but some of these should be hard to get, fe. putting Heavy Infantry in deep water should result in heavy infantry trying to swim. I know he cant move there during normal game, but of course it is possible to put him there.

[Darth Fool]

It seems to me the way to implement idling animations would be to set an idle time say 30 seconds. If nothing had been done within the last idle period, a unit that is on screen is chosen at random, the unit's idle animation (chosen randomly if it has more than one) is played, and the idle clock is reset. I don't see the need to have lots of idle animations going on all at once, one is enough. Of course, boucman has said that he is working on it, so it will likely be something completely different from, but equally as functional as, everything that has been suggested to date.

[Boucman]

Actually I'm done...

DF, your sugestion would probalby have been better, but harder to code.

moreover players useually play ( ) so the game is rarely idle for 30'' except when observing/waiting for your turn

the way it is done right now is that we have one counter per unit, which tells when we should play the next idle animation.

this coulter is reset whenever anything happens to the unit (including playing an idle animation of course)

every time it is set to 30000ms + rand(10000)
these values are hardcoded, and I don't plan to have them WML-changable

however they have been set to what I feel would be nice value, and I could be totally wrong. so these are the values we will have in 1.3.1 and if the feedback is negative they will be changed.

trial and error is the best approch I think...

[Redeth]

Relax people, the swordsman dropping his weapon on his foot was just an (unfortunate) example I used to make it clear that ideas should be described in detail and be as specific as possible. It was not intended to be an actual animation. I agree it wouldn't be suitable.

To make things clear: I'm not at all for the 'juvenile humour' or the funny animations that make no sense. A goblin spearman falling asleep makes a lot of sense to me. He lacks any military training, he's very irresponsable, has no discipline, he's physically weak so he gets tired often and easily, he's careless, and he's not exactly "in the middle of a battle" (which would make him look nervous or scared), he's just... well, idling.

Anyway, there'll plenty of time for regulations, prohibitions and censorship on the animations, but for now it'd be good to focus on the creative process and the brainstorming of positive ideas, I think.

Actually I'm done...

Excellent!

Or perhaps flip the axe into the air (not very high) and catch it by the handle again.

Like this?

[Jetrel]

Or perhaps flip the axe into the air (not very high) and catch it by the handle again.

Like this?

That is wonderful - with just some minor cleanups (tweaking the details), it's ready to go. All of the actual animation whatnot is fine, the only thing we need is:

• In the later frames, he needs shadowing under his beard like he has in the earlier frames and standing frame. About 1-2 pixels would do it.

Do that, and post the resulting frames in a zip.

Also, post the frames of the goblin in a zip as well.