Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Dwarves

[thespaceinvader]

NB: don't worry too much about numbers of frames. Each Drake currently has of the order of 30, and that's without any north frames at all...

[Jetrel]

Okay, I'd like to get at mass-committing these. If it's not an inconvenience to you, could you post consolidated zips containing everything from the units you have done thus far? (And that'd include WML, if you've got it.) They're currently spread across this thread, in what may be various states of WIP.

If it is an inconvenience, just tell me to do it and I will. I'm serious - I don't want to waste your time if you haven't got this packed up - I'd rather you spent that drawing.

[Sleepwalker]

Yeah no problem. Some file names was a bit inconsistent so i renamed everything to go by unit-angle-anim as in ambusher-ne-attack1. Got no wml though.

341 frames, man where did they come from.

[Jetrel]

Yeah no problem. Some file names was a bit inconsistent so i renamed everything to go by unit-angle-anim as in ambusher-ne-attack1. Got no wml though.

Consistency will be really helpful as I macroify these. I've gotten macros together for some half of it, now, and once the macros are done, I can basically one-line these animations due to their consistency in frame length and such.

I mean, it'd be really nice to be able to do this without macros. To be able to just say "I have 12 frames here, and they're all named {filename}-1..12.png, and all are 50ms long.

341 frames, man where did they come from.

Welcome to the club:

[thespaceinvader]

Yah, take it from the guy who eventually coded all the new drakes. Once you know what you're doing, making each anim the same length makes life SO, SO much easier. I could probably have boiled the majority of the drakes' anims down to a single macro call, if I felt so inclined. I decided to leave it at 4 to 6 unique macros, though...

That is one hint I should have thought about mentioning at the start of the process, actually. But you figured it out, so it's all good...

[Jetrel]

The augur and soothsayer have been committed.

The pack of images you sent, for all units, seem to be missing their NE defense animations. We need to fix that. It's up to you whether you do it or I. I've wired the current WML to expect their presence, so it's showing missing frames for those animations.


TSI will note that I've put all of their images in unit-specific subdirs inside ~/saurians/. Since we're not getting spritesheets or opengl support anytime soon, this is fair game for other races now. Yes, I remember the discussion we had about the drakes, and this sort of changes my ruling on that. Sort of in that - I still don't want us to have more than one toplevel images/units/race-subset/ folder for most races, like the humans had been split into. That was what was being suggested at the time.

Yah, take it from the guy who eventually coded all the new drakes. Once you know what you're doing, making each anim the same length makes life SO, SO much easier. I could probably have boiled the majority of the drakes' anims down to a single macro call, if I felt so inclined. I decided to leave it at 4 to 6 unique macros, though...

Such to the point that I'm going to pad the mismatching 8 and 9 frame NE/SE throwing animations to match each other.

[thespaceinvader]

For now, I think I'll leave it alone, for the simple reason that it's all working fine and if I change it, I know I'll break something. But when we come to do north anims and standing/death anims, I'll definitely split them up, I think - it all just gets a little unweildy if you want to actually find something...

[Jetrel]

I've committed everything you gave me in that .zip.

I think - it all just gets a little unwieldy if you want to actually find something...

Also, unwieldy if you are, like me, using something like "a better finder rename" to batch-rename files to fit a certain scheme, or combining two sets of partly finished animations, like the we did in mating these new NE animations with the existing melee/magic animations to the SE for the augur line.

[Sleepwalker]

Welcome to the club:

Awesome duck is awesome.


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Consistency will be really helpful as I macroify these. I've gotten macros together for some half of it, now, and once the macros are done, I can basically one-line these animations due to their consistency in frame length and such.

I mean, it'd be really nice to be able to do this without macros. To be able to just say "I have 12 frames here, and they're all named {filename}-1..12.png, and all are 50ms long.

Yah, take it from the guy who eventually coded all the new drakes. Once you know what you're doing, making each anim the same length makes life SO, SO much easier. I could probably have boiled the majority of the drakes' anims down to a single macro call, if I felt so inclined. I decided to leave it at 4 to 6 unique macros, though...

That is one hint I should have thought about mentioning at the start of the process, actually. But you figured it out, so it's all good...

The pack of images you sent, for all units, seem to be missing their NE defense animations. We need to fix that. It's up to you whether you do it or I. I've wired the current WML to expect their presence, so it's showing missing frames for those animations.

Such to the point that I'm going to pad the mismatching 8 and 9 frame NE/SE throwing animations to match each other.

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Eh, its not only the throw animations that has mismatching frame lengths. S and SE spear thrusts got 8 while the N and NE ones have 10 frames... S and SE he just thrusts, while for N and NE he makes a small jump as he thrusts, using the power of his legs as in the flavor. Also I didn't do all anims with a common frame speed. Some frames are meant to last longer while a few others for like 25ms. This is only for the skirmisher line melee and throw though. If I had known that it was preferred to have equal anim lengths I would have done it that way, now I just went with adding frames as I felt was needed.

Yeah I haven't gotten to making the defense frames just yet. This is what I got left:

-Finish Flanker melee anims
-All lvl2 and lvl3 death anims
-All Oracle anims
-All NE defense anims

Here's the Flanker S attack so that leaves N and NE. I'll do the skirmisher and augur defense after that so at least those units will have full sets of animation.
I'll continue to post the anims as I make them here even if you get the whole package afterward.

[thespaceinvader]

As long as each type of animation has a consistent number of frames and timings across the set of unit levels, it doesn't matter if they have different numbers per anim.

So you could have south anims with 10 frames and some short ones, and se anims with 8 frames all the same length, but as long the skirmisher, flanker and ambusher all have the same schema for each of those animations, we can make macros. It's when one se anim has 8 frames, one 9, one 10, that it becomes more difficult.

IYSWIM.

[Jetrel]

Actually, I'm probably going do what we do on frogatto, which is duplicate some appropriate frame in those rare instances when an animation needs an extra frame of padding somewhere to match the others.

[Sleepwalker]

Yup, crystal clear. Ne attack coming up...

Damn, that Frogatto game got some really top notch pixel art.

EDIT: And the last one.

[Sleepwalker]

Alright some defend frames done. The skirmisher had only one frame for the old defend so I redid that one. SE augur defend is unchanged. So lvl1 units are finished!

[Jetrel]

All this new stuff has been committed. I should be up to date with everything you've posted.

[Sleepwalker]

It's been a slow week but fret not, more stuff coming up!

All defense frames except for the oracle done. For the oracle I've made the frame to base all NE animations from. Posting it just in case you spot any design error. I don't think there is any but hey.