Major's Anims.

[thespaceinvader]

Spearman looks much better, but I'd recommend a little step forward with the front foot as he brings the spear over. Otherwise, that looks good to shade to me.

The Swordsman, we could probably salvage a workable base frame from that, but I have to say I doubt that the animation's terribly usable. It could probably be fixed, but it would take just as much effort to start from scratch and make a new one, and that is probably easier.

[homunculus]

It definitely needs to climb rather than simply rise, unless we add a magic effect, but that would probably look cheesy. I'd suggest that you work on something else for a while, and we'll come back to this at another moment and see what we can hammer out.

if it will be the climb, i wonder what plans you have for the mounted zombie recruitment animation?

rather than just rising, the zombie could be pulled out of the ground something like this:

zombie-pull.gif (43.05 KiB) Viewed 3301 times

might solve the superman problem, but that might also not work very well with mounted zombie.

[thespaceinvader]

None whatsoever, there's no way AFAIK to recruit mounted zombies directly, you can only make them by Plague. The anim you have there looks good for what it is, but conceptually if we're going to have 'rise from the grave', I'm very sure it needs to be climbing. Magic is the easy way out and will look cheap.

But I do still want to put in that magic cloud thing for plague events. It looks good and would cover the transition well. must remember to do so.

[boru]

Mounted WCs can be recruited, by use of the macro {RECRUIT_UNIT_VARIATIONS}

[thespaceinvader]

Ah, fair enough.

To answer the question less facetiously then; the mounted version wouldn't have a recruit anim. Nor would any of the other variations, for the moment.

[Major]

Here is the origional NE baseframe I made, although it does look like it's facing north.
What do you mean by

but I'd recommend a little step forward with the front foot as he brings the spear over.

?

[thespaceinvader]

So his left foot slides forward a little as he brings the spear across his body, then his right foot steps forward to strike.

I think we're probably better off starting from scratch with the swordsman base - there are enough niggling things wrong with it that I'd probably wind up requesting that it all be re-done anyway. Give it a try, come up with something that looks more northeast than north, and looks less bandy-legged and fly-swatted. In particular, the feet should both point right, at on the spearman, and they MUST look less flat.

[Major]

If we extend his reach even further it's gonna make problems 'cause the current one already lunges to within one pixel of the 72x72 border and with motion blur its gonna touch it, AND I haven't even aligned it properly yet.

tl:dr: It's gonna be to big if we extend his attack.

[thespaceinvader]

Size matters not. You can extend the frames as much as you need to, as long as you extend them by the same amount in the opposite direction so things remain properly centred.

... I thought you knew that...

[Major]

Well I'm totally reliable aren't I. Sighhh...
Anyway here's the shaded North attack anim.
C&C?

[SFault]

His head could turn earlier. Now it looks like his neck is stuck and only moves when shoulders are turned. Otherwise very nice.

[Atz]

In addition to what SFault said, I think he needs to move a bit faster when he actually thrusts, and maybe put his back into it a bit more. I don't get the impression that he's thrusting very hard at the moment.

[thespaceinvader]

I'd be inclined to stretch out the motion a bit more, ans SFault is correct about the head, but otherwise that looks good.

[Major]

I'll fix the head, but what do you mean by stretch the motion out more? Do you mean you want the spear to end up further forward? It might look slightly wierd, given that we are seeing him from above and behind.

[thespaceinvader]

Pretty much, yeah. It just doesn't look that big right now - have a go and see how it looks, bearing in mind that the motion blur still has to be added. Maybe the head of the spear could come about 3 pix further up, and the body shift forward by one or two pix at the same moment.