Generic Animations (version 0.1, for 1.13.4 and later)

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zookeeper
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Generic Animations (version 0.1, for 1.13.4 and later)

Post by zookeeper »

Preamble:

There are some people who might be bothered by many if not most units in the game missing either all or some of their animations, and who would prefer a more consistent set of unit visuals.

Description:

Generic Animations is an global modification add-on which replaces all existing sprite animations (except idle animations) with programmatically generated effects. Existing sounds, timing, projectiles and halo effects are kept, but the actual sprite animations are removed, while several procedural effects are added to liven up combat animations in a way that suits unanimated sprites. As a result, all units are animated in a consistent manner. This happens everywhere, both in campaigns and multiplayer, as long as the add-on remains installed.

How to use:

Simply install it. After that, all standard unit animations should be affected, even when loading existing saves. After uninstalling the add-on, everything should return to normal even in existing saves.

Status:

Version 0.1: functionally more or less complete, but I've not tested it with any UMC eras, only mainline units. There's likely many UMC units with which this doesn't work well yet. Hopefully the specifics of the animations and effects will get further improvement, and especially the red hit effects are currently very basic and it would be nice to have better ones.

Known issues:
  • Size of savefiles increased (roughly by perhaps about 30-40%, for compressed saves).
  • There's a few types of animations that are not yet covered, but which are very rare in mainline content:
    • Animations added by [object]s (for example Storm Tridents, or some special cutscene animations).
    • Attack and defense animations defined with [animation] tags instead of [attack_anim] and [defend] tags.
    • Some rarely used animation types (teleport, for instance).
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doofus-01
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Re: Generic Animations (version 0.1, for 1.13.4 and later)

Post by doofus-01 »

Nice idea. As a side benefit, it stops the silly bouncing animations (e.g. Spearman, Orc Archer), even if that means taking out the better standing animations (Ghost, Bats).

Is filtering for "missing animations only" in the roadmap? Something like this might be a better default than the current "sliding statue" attack.

My impression of the "attack animation" was that it made everyone look like a Ghost attacking. Do you think it would work to have the "hit" splash like you have now, but to also have a swoosh over the attacker sprite, the shape/color of which depends on the damage type (just like the red images)?
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zookeeper
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Re: Generic Animations (version 0.1, for 1.13.4 and later)

Post by zookeeper »

doofus-01 wrote:Is filtering for "missing animations only" in the roadmap? Something like this might be a better default than the current "sliding statue" attack.
Not really; I didn't want to mix existing animations with these ones, because visually they're so completely different. Especially the attackers' flashing outlines are something that isn't really possible to apply to an existing animation, so you'd end up with an arguably worse inconsistency than what this is supposed to circumvent in the first place. The intent is very much to sidestep the issues of missing animations entirely, rather than try to make them look better.

doofus-01 wrote:My impression of the "attack animation" was that it made everyone look like a Ghost attacking. Do you think it would work to have the "hit" splash like you have now, but to also have a swoosh over the attacker sprite, the shape/color of which depends on the damage type (just like the red images)?
Yeah, something like that could work better. I settled for the blurry slide for now simply because I wanted to make melee clearly distinguishable from ranged, but that's something that could be accomplished with well-designed attacker swooshes as well.
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