Mr.
shihonage: How do you time the animation? I mean, given a bunch of sprites of the walking animations, how do you measure how much time does it have to have between each sprite, so the walking looks natural? I'm talking about 2D. I know that in the 3D land this is almost automatic.
Sincerely:
The Frian Bargo.
Hey Frian, how's LandWaste 1/2 going?
My artist pointed out that on his end the animations look a bit different due to custom pausing (frame duplication) in his test software. Yet the animation handler on my end is written from scratch, and right now the custom timing is hardcoded, and used mostly for manhandling the "fire" animations, not walking.
The system may need to be upgraded later to read custom timing files. Or not.
shihonage
That's a very nice looking walk animation. Not to nitpick but I am curious, are you using different movement animation(s) for combat? That animation looks like someone is just casually walking around (and does a really great job at it) but would look off in combat.
A lot of games in the past that have used the same movement animations in combat and non-combat gameplay have usually not had this issue as much due to the fact that their walk animations weren't all that great (unlike the one you have here) or they walked around as if in combat mode all the time.
I am not really concerned about this because:
a) I am very much leaning toward going back to TB combat, because while the PwRT system right now "looks" slick (and never requires reflexes), the Codex has educated me on just how much more character stats and player thinking can be infused into a TB system. In TB combat, it's more akin to moving the chess pieces around, and who cares if they walk "relaxed".
b) A lot of shit in TB combat will [be allowed to] speed up to comical levels, just like people did with Fallout1/2 speed slider, so it will not really look "dignified" or "proper" anyway. I may switch it to "run" animations in that mode to make it look less awkward, though.
c) This kind of artist (someone mature/experienced, as opposed to enthusiastic and erratic) is not cheap, and I've been skimping on animations. There are less animation states than in Fallout - no breathing, no head scratching, no weapon holstering. Weapon holstering and most "interactions" (with control panels, or stealing) are handled via "fiddle" animation. There are no ultraviolent deaths either, which saddens me a bit. I may have to draw them myself, likely in 2 directions only (West, and then mirror it to the East).
If I had Fargo's money (or Fallout's budget), or maybe if I was insane and was willing to blow all my savings, I'd be able to load the artist to the point of replicating Fallout's graphical richness. As it stands, I'm just glad to have the few major armor types multiplied by their "walking with weapon" and "firing weapon" animations for several Fallout-like weapon types.
We'll also be doing some scenery and monsters, and I will be attempting some procedural tricks in the renderer, to create the illusion of higher graphical diversity than there really will be.
