New saurian units

[Refumee]

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.

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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]

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]

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.

[doofus-01]

I think they might have too much "vitality". Maybe not bobbing like a prizefighter, but still at least an angry drunk, rather than a staggering corpse-puppet.

That said, it's a good start, and can always be revised later, so go ahead with a PR. A quick thing that might make them look more dead is to keep the tail from lifting off the ground and moving around. Maybe it gets dragged a bit as they move left/right, but keep it limp and lifeless.

[Talentless]

I think they might have too much "vitality". Maybe not bobbing like a prizefighter, but still at least an angry drunk, rather than a staggering corpse-puppet.

That's true, I was going for a slower saurian bobbing which by itself is quite substantial for an idle animation. Perhaps this is something that could be partially addressed by slowing the animation down? For reference, here are some gifs respectively with fixed 300ms between frames and the variable offsets (350-980ms) currently defined for the mounted sprite frames:

zombie-saurian-standing-300ms.gif (3.45 KiB) Viewed 958 times

zombie-saurian-standing-slow.gif (3.45 KiB) Viewed 958 times

A quick thing that might make them look more dead is to keep the tail from lifting off the ground and moving around. Maybe it gets dragged a bit as they move left/right, but keep it limp and lifeless.

Soulless saurian's pose is already pretty dynamic with the tail looking as if it's in the middle of some movement. To achieve a more dragged look I think I'd have to change how the tail is placed during the idle animation.

soulless-saurian.png (782 Bytes) Viewed 958 times