[interface] synchronised idle animations

[dogscoff]

I have a feeling this is not a new idea, but it wasn't in the frequently suggested list and a quick search yielded nothing.

It would look cool if certain idle animations were flagged as "synchronised". What does this mean?
When an animation with this flag plays, the game checks to see if there are any units of the same type and side in adjacent hexes. If there are, then all adjacent units of that type and side play the same idle anim at the same time.

This would be neat for some of the military-looking "salute" or "attention!" type animations like the dwarf steadfast or the fencer. Obviously it would not be suitable for all the sniffing, scratching, belching, eating and goofing around animations, like the saurian spear-fisher or the dwarf steelclad hammer-spin.

All we need then is an animation of the walking corpses doing the thriller dance routine

[professor_max]

I like the idea, although it wouldn't be used much by mainline units.

If you don't know C++, you can submit a feature request at bugs.wesnoth.org. If you do, then write some code.

It might even be possible in a very long way with Lua code, but I wouldn't know.

'Professor Max'

[pauxlo]

Actually, I would not restrict this to "units of same type". If two unit types have fitting animations that should be synchronized, this would also be nice. So, instead have "animations with same identifier" or such.

[em3]

Actually, I think this would only make them look like automatons. To make it natural, the animation system would have to add some minuscule random delays, so that the units would not be in total sync. That would require more work, though.

[Insinuator]

Actually, I think this would only make them look like automatons. To make it natural, the animation system would have to add some minuscule random delays, so that the units would not be in total sync. That would require more work, though.

That's a good polish idea, but it's really a cosmetic complaint. If the ability to control idle animations was introduced into WML somehow, syncing them so they look realistic by introducing microsecond delays would seem the easy part to me.