Major's Anims.

[Major]

Here are some animations I've done so far. Prior to (hopefully) putting them in the game some of them need touching up.

Dwarf explorer idle anim2.gif (11.17 KiB) Viewed 4577 times

Dwarf pathfinder idle anim.gif (20.52 KiB) Viewed 4577 times

Zombie Idle Anim-3.gif (12.26 KiB) Viewed 4577 times

Zombie Recruit Anim.gif (10.66 KiB) Viewed 4577 times

Suggestions? Critique?

[thespaceinvader]

Scout: his front arm gets a lot shorter as he turns. This needs fixing. I'll do an edit to the axe blade to show you what I mean when I say it needs to point more towards camera. Also, since the whole intention of the thing was to shade his face, it ought to shade his face some...

Pathfinder: the movements of his free arm and leg are not smooth - they jump back and forth. Move them smoothly to one place, keep them there, then move them back. The motion of putting the axe away and the compass is done well - but make sure there's a third axe handle when the axe is in the bag...

Zombie: could do with a touch more motion in the legs (NOT the feet) - so rotate his body to his left slightly (this WILL require redrawing some parts of his body) when he reaches behind him, and move his legs, maybe turn his feet, to compensate.

Zombie recruit: good generally, but as Jet said about it, the hole being that far behind/above his feet makes no kinematic sense. Having it fade away/the pile of earth crumble in behind him would make more sense. And this is a general one, but the whole movement could feel more...lurchy. Currently it looks like a fit man climbing out of a hole, not a rotting corpse hauling itself out of a grave.

Keep up the good work - these are a cut above the majority, they're just not quite there yet.

[Major]

Touched up the pathfinder.

[thespaceinvader]

That looks good to me. Can you put the shadows in, and post the pngs so I can test it in-game, please =)

[Major]

PNG's with shadows.

[Major]

Here is a blocking of the WC recruit anim.
Thoughts?

[Frogger5]

I reckon you should get rid of the hesitation.

[zookeeper]

Looks good, however the player can't do anything during a recruit anim, so ~3 seconds is a bit much. A simple task of recruiting 6 WCs would take a minimum of 18 seconds to do without acceleration.

Of course that's not the way the game should work, but considering that we've had an open bug report for that issue for 4 years, I don't think it's very likely to change anytime soon either.

[Major]

It would be really easy to change the speed and delays.

[Dixie]

I think your WC recruit anim is pretty good in absolute, but that somehow it has the same flaw that the other was condemned for: it looks more like a human climbing out of a hole than a reanimated corpse crawling outta its grave. Sure, it bangs his head on the floor, but after that it's the same, imho. Maybe instead of having him fall to the ground so hard and wait so long like that, you could use that as a pretext to slowly but steadily claw and crawl out of the hole, rather than really climb it. Imagine it's less deep, perhaps?

Just my thoughts on the matter

[Sangel]

Of course that's not the way the game should work, but considering that we've had an open bug report for that issue for 4 years, I don't think it's very likely to change anytime soon either.

Wesnoth isn't the only game to suffer from that particular problem. Big-budget commercial games sometimes suffer from the same issue (I'm looking at you, King's Bounty: The Legend).

[Blarumyrran]

Most of the time, he's digging through stone castle floor.

(it doesn't really work for Plague convert either, as he wouldn't have to be coming from the underground then)

[boru]

While I think this is a strong idea, and generally don't want to leave you another negative message, the vanishing hole is gonna bother me every time one of these guys is recruited. I understand why the hole has to vanish, obviously it can't just stay there, but seeing holes vanishing all over the keep is going to really be strange.

Maybe there ought to be a special necromancer's keep, with holes already built in, and skeletons, deathblades and such crawl out when recruited? And maybe that annoying radio tuning noise that's supposed to be "dark magic" would stop playing with every recruit?

[Dixie]

While I think this is a strong idea, and generally don't want to leave you another negative message, the vanishing hole is gonna bother me every time one of these guys is recruited. I understand why the hole has to vanish, obviously it can't just stay there, but seeing holes vanishing all over the keep is going to really be strange.

Maybe there ought to be a special necromancer's keep, with holes already built in, and skeletons, deathblades and such crawl out when recruited? And maybe that annoying radio tuning noise that's supposed to be "dark magic" would stop playing with every recruit?

Or maybe he could lift a tomb-stone-like slab stone slab with he would let down afterwards, closing the hole? Or just give a kick on a dirt pile to fill the hole or something, maybe as he crawls out of it so it doesn't take even more time?

[Major]

The death animation is the zombie dissolving in a cloud of toxic fumes, mabe the zombie can be created that way too.