New saurian units

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Refumee
Posts: 259
Joined: February 12th, 2023, 10:17 am
Location: Vendraxis' Lair

Re: New saurian units

Post by Refumee »

Talentless wrote: March 6th, 2025, 7:25 pm Don't know how I missed this before, but undead saurians lack a lot of the animations. I can't imagine how death could stop saurians from bobbing.

zombie-saurian-standing.gif

I did a basic standing animation for the Lv0 zombie saurian. To match the mounted zombie and cat, I made 7 frames with the second frame repeating at the end (i.e. [1~7,2] in WML). I tried to do some subtle robe animation as well, but it's difficult to make it smooth without it looking off or barely noticeable. Let me know if it needs any adjustments or if you have any comments regarding the robe movement, doofus-01.

---

If I'm understanding WML correctly, my only worry is that the frame length is hardcoded in the standing animation definition:

Code: Select all

    [standing_anim]
        [filter]
            #included are the base unit and variation="mounted" and "cat"
            [not]
                variation="ant,bat,beast_rider,boar,bug,drake,dwarf,falcon,fish,goblin,gryphon,horse,rat,sand_scorpion,saurian,scorpion,serpent,spider,swimmer,troll,wolf,wose"
            [/not]
        [/filter]
        start_time=0
        [frame]
            image="units/undead/{BASE_NAME}-standing-[1~7,2].png~{IPF}({ARG}):[580,980,600,430,350*2,420,720]"
        [/frame]
    [/standing_anim]
Seems like a large delay between each frame that doesn't really fit more dynamic movement like saurians' bobbing. For comparison, saurian idle macro (and the gif I attached) has a delay of 200ms between frames. Should I attempt to parametrize the UNIT_BODY_WALKING_CORPSE_GRAPHICS macro with customizable animation length, or do an override specific to the saurian variant?

Speaking of overrides, I noticed that the saurian zombie has pretty vanilla stats despite their movement type having pretty unique defenses with notably high evasion on sand and swamp, as well as the pierce resistance. Thoughts on some possible resistance and defense changes?

Code: Select all

        [resistance]
            blade=110
            pierce=80
            impact=110
        [/resistance]
        [defense]
            sand=60
            swamp_water=50
            shallow_water=70
        [/defense]
Loving it, glad you are back!

I also let my undead saurians bob, but with just half the speed. And yours look more sophisticated.
Talentless
Posts: 43
Joined: June 10th, 2015, 6:43 am

Re: New saurian units

Post by Talentless »

I completely missed that they already have modified defenses and resistances, pretty much matching the living saurians. I only read the WML file and missed that they have a modified movement type which also happen to affect the resists. Confirmed this in game. So, custom stats are not necessary. (In fact, they would be a nerf. 🫣)

Anyway, I'll try to prepare soulless standing frames before submitting a pull request. Let me know what you think is the best approach to handling the offsets in WML (modified macro vs overrides), I think 200-250ms is the sweet spot.
Talentless
Posts: 43
Joined: June 10th, 2015, 6:43 am

Re: New saurian units

Post by Talentless »

Finished the saurian soulless standing animation and fixed the shadows in the zombie frames. Here's a side by side comparison at 200ms per frame with the skirmisher sprite.
Attachments
undead-saurian-standing.zip
(25.29 KiB) Downloaded 52 times
soulless-saurian-standing.gif
soulless-saurian-standing.gif (4.07 KiB) Viewed 3153 times
skirmisher-se-bob.gif
skirmisher-se-bob.gif (3.09 KiB) Viewed 3153 times
zombie-saurian-standing.gif
zombie-saurian-standing.gif (3.45 KiB) Viewed 3153 times
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