Major's Anims.

[boru]

Looks good. Is it wide enough for mounted wc's?

[thespaceinvader]

Probably not, but that's why we have fade effects

[Boucman]

It would be a shame to use the concept of "appearing in a cloud of smoke" on the zombie...

it's hare to get a working concept for recruit animations and we have a good one with the zombie unearthing itself....

it would be great to use on a highly magical unit, though, the ghost for example...

[thespaceinvader]

INdeed - in the long term, I'd like to use the hole-climb for the recruit event, and the smoke clour for the plague event. But for the moment, while we're ironing the kinks out of the hole climb, the smoke cloud will do =)

[Major]

Thanks for all the encouragement!
I've posted the current frames. I kind of like the bubbles, they seem to represent evil magic ,decay and rotting things much more than the smoke does, but I will change it if you want me to.

Plague Storm.zip

(10.78 KiB) Downloaded 248 times

I've had another idea (Oh dear) when the dark adept/necromancer recruits these things he raises his arms like he's summoning something, which he is. Would it work to have the corpse rise/levitate out of the ground, then be struck by a bolt of energy which reanimates it?

[thespaceinvader]

I'd still go for the hole climb, if we can make it short and snappy enough. It has by far the most character and interest value. The way to do it would probably be to skip the 'hand out first' part, and just have his whole upper body erupting, staying upright, second hand comes out, opposite foot comes out and he lurches up, hole filling in as he does so. Though of course, it would help if the recruit animations didn't block further recruitment.

The odd thing (and I could be wrong about this) that I don't think they block the repeat recruit hotkey - as I said thoguh, I could be wrong. There's not enough of them to be easily sure, particularly if the anims for the recruited unit and the recruiting unit have different behaviours in this regard.

[Boucman]

I'm pretty sure they do block the engine...

non-blocking animations are very tricky in their interaction with the main game...

non-moving animations like recruit could probably be converted, but those like attack and mvt where there is heavy risk of WML interaction and unforseen events (not mentioning the internal tricks with fake units) are very tricky to do in a safe way

[thespaceinvader]

Ah, yeah. Either way, is it practical, for the moment, to wire this in for Plague, at the very least?

[Darker_Dreams]

Would it be possible to make the (non interactive) animations *potentially* non-blocking? ie; recruit, die, and others that don't generally effect other units/hexes can have the blocking turned off if the animation is long and the creator thinks it won't do anything horrible (but it remains on by default to protect against random unconsidered strangeness) while move, attack, defend and other obviously interactive animations don't get that?
Meh, long(er) term peanut gallery musing.


After looking at the overlay; if that doesn't get abused to heck and back by UMC creators I'm going to be very disappointed. A couple quick recolors and I see ninjas and magicians vanishing in puffs of smoke, alchemist potions exploding, and a variety of other spell effects.

[Major]

Oh dearie me...

[Boucman]

darker_dream: possibly doable, not complicated to code, but needs to be very carefull with the consequences... what if a WML event triggers just after the anim. do we wait for it ?

I'll give it some thought....

[Major]

Here is the improved recruit anim. (I think that makes five now).

[Darker_Dreams]

All I can think is; didn't Superman wear a cape when he burst in to save the day?

[Major]

Yeahh..... It does look a little bit too smooth.

[Darker_Dreams]

Recognizing I'm peanut-gallery, but I think your best framework is the original hole-climb. Yes, it looks like a guy climbing out of a hole, but I'm not sure what else a human body's going to look like when it, y'know, climbs out of a hole. I think you'd be better served trying to find the "uncanny valley" with that than trying to do something inhuman. It'd be hard at sprite-scale, but that seems like your best bet. Maybe adding in stutters and shifts to get a lurchy "not working well" quality to its motion? Maybe instead of stepping out of the hole (or face-flopping) have it crawl a little? I dunno.