Wolf rider movement animation

Post by **Thrawn** » January 10th, 2006, 10:24 pm

wow-my respect for turin has gone up again.

Really nice--ditto with the head though, needs to move a bit too.

Post by **turin** » January 11th, 2006, 1:18 am

Ok, here's frames 1-6 with my attempts at rotating them. (IIRC, I actually cut frame 5, because the jump seemed proportionally too long and the animation still looks smooth without it, so this is really 1,2,3,4,6,7.)

Note that I am NOT saying this is useable in-game. There are 2 more frames that go on the end.

Post by **turin** » January 11th, 2006, 2:15 am

Never mind, updated version... this has all the frames done (I cut it down to 7 frames, not sure how; IMHO it looks decent. Not sure where I could add a frame.)

There are probably a bunch of pixels that aren't the right color, stuff like that. I can clear it up, but I want the basic structure correct first.

Post by **Dave** » January 11th, 2006, 3:55 am

While I think the animation looks excellent going horizontally -- very nice work turin -- I'm dubious about whether it can be made to actually look good going any of the directions we need it to go in.

That is to say, I am not sure walking animations, especially this one, can be made to look good, especially at the speed units move.

I would be happy to be convinced otherwise though.

David

Post by **Jetrel** » January 11th, 2006, 6:26 am

Dave, you are really scaring me.

I've seen this in-game, and it looks wonderful. And it makes sense that it would look wonderful, since both Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II have basically the exact same thing (except with horses instead of wolves). Their units have the same perspective, and move faster (at least in warcraft II) than ours.

It makes me worry about a lot of things - could it be that you harbor a notion that the movement animations in those two blockbuster commercial successes looked bad? I think they looked great.

I'm hoping it's just general trepidation on your end (worrying over Turin throwing away effort), not unrealistic expectations, or an aesthetic world-view that doesn't agree with mine.

ANYHOW, I've previewed this in-game (my per-frame timing was 40ms), and it did bring home one fear that I should have addressed earlier, and which we may as well tackle now, before we do any more work. The wolf is too short - the edit to change it's perspective ended up (unfortunately) shrinking it's body by a bit. So, we need to add some 2-3 pixels to the length of the wolf's torso.

Other than that, there's the obvious addition of the shadow, and perhaps some fine-tuning of movement/cleaning up of texturing pixels, and then this puppy is done (no pun intended).

Post by **Dave** » January 11th, 2006, 2:12 pm

Jetryl,

I haven't seen them in-game, and if you have, and say they look good, I'll trust your judgement.

And yes, I think Warcraft 2 looks great.

I'm absolutely all for having movement animations if we can make them look good.

One thing I just want to make clear that I'm not in favor of is this: I don't want to slow down the speed at which our units move in order to make walking animations look better. That would be favoring appearance over functionality, which I don't think is a good idea.

David

Post by **Boucman** » January 11th, 2006, 2:23 pm

dave, I'm the coder responsible for that, jetryl is only the artist

more seriously, if you remember the anim movement code, it worked basically like an animation, except that the whole thing was reimplemented in the move_unit_between function

now we use the animation primitives which allows us to change the image displayed during the mvt

but the costy part (CPU wise) is to redraw the tiles on which we are walking, not choosing the image to display, and that was something we already did, so I don't think the performance cost could be measurable

however, the animated mvt slightly slower than the mvt image thing (perception wise) for reason of frame timing. i.e we did a trial and error process to find the right animation length and ended with an animation which is slightly longer (barely percievable)

no if it's not the CPU cost your worried about, but the strain on the artist community, or if you want the timing of animations to be reduced, it's back to jetryl

and BTW, turbo mode is still 5x faster

Post by **Dave** » January 11th, 2006, 2:58 pm

Boucman,

I'm not concerned about the CPU time taken. I'm sure that's not an issue.

What I am concerned about is if the artists end up saying "well we've done all these animations, but they don't look good because the units move much too fast. Can we please make units move three times slower than they do now so our animations look decent?"

That's what seems to happen with lots of commercial games. They make units move much slower to fit in 'cool' animations.

David

Elvish_Pillager · Post by **Elvish_Pillager** » January 11th, 2006, 8:29 pm

The units move too slow already!

Post by **turin** » January 11th, 2006, 11:05 pm

Uh... since you can hold down "shift" to switch between accelerated speed and normal speed (an awesome feature, BTW), I don't see how such a slowdown could be a problem... not that such a slow-down is going to be requested anyway.

In any case, Jetryl - I'm not sure quite what kind of elongation you're talking about. Do you care to apply the changes you're talking about to the base image, so I can then apply them to all 7 frames?

Post by **Dave** » January 11th, 2006, 11:45 pm

turin wrote:Uh... since you can hold down "shift" to switch between accelerated speed and normal speed (an awesome feature, BTW), I don't see how such a slowdown could be a problem

Because some people (like me) don't like playing at 'accelerated' speed, but don't want the game crawling at a snail's pace either.

Elvish_Pillager · Post by **Elvish_Pillager** » January 12th, 2006, 11:02 am

No problem, we'll get those sliders implemented eventually...

Post by **Darth Fool** » January 12th, 2006, 1:04 pm

So let me sit on the fence on this one. I think that we can have are cake and eat it to. If are fearless art director can make sure that all unit animations for movement are the same length in time(not necessarily in # of frames) then it should be quite possible to keep the new animations from slowing down gameplay. I think this is a good idea anyways, since units that move the same speed across a given terrain should take the same amount of time to cross it. All that is needed is an official standard movement animation length.

Post by **deserter** » January 12th, 2006, 1:22 pm

The animation was crappy at the start, but now it's nearing perfect.

I have a feeling that this movement animation thing is going to be a long and hard project and if I had a hat I would tip it to anyone involved. (no hat fits me because of my dreadlocks) And the same goes to the multi-hex terrain project. Keep it up!

I feel like I'm posting meaningless post, but I really did want to point it out this time.

entropomorphic · Post by **entropomorphic** » January 13th, 2006, 6:29 pm

Warcraft 2 also had the luxury of having a crack team of dedicated paid professional artists on deadlines... as well as image sizes (32x32) less than half the size of Wesnoth's. They did, however, create animations for 8 directions compared to Wesnoth's 6.

Given Wesnoth's history, I don't think it'd be too much of a problem for the move animations to be implemented slowly, unit by unit. Having 5 units that move much nicer than the rest is better, IMO, than giving them all 2-frame, horizontally-oriented movement animations that look forced.