What to do about special animation features

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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Ok, let's keep this thread from dying...
Boucman wrote:that's what it does, if a unit is moved north-east, it will stay facing north east from that point onward...
I'm reasonably sure this is generally felt to be a really bad thing. For the foreseeable future, anyway.

Here's what I'd do: make even the units with directional standing frames behave like they do now (no directional standing besides left/right, sw/se, or whatever it is that we see now) and when enough units have directional standing frames (50-70% of mainline units?) change it to the behaviour you describe. Otherwise, it'll look horrible if a few units suddenly start standing around in odd positions.

Although, I wouldn't be surprised if directional standing caused units to generally become too difficult to recognize. In which case, directional standing (except in fights) would obviously need to be removed anyway.

Option for turning off walking animations sounds good. Perhaps more options for turning on and off all of this this fancy animation stuff (directional standing, directional combat) would be good. And if you're thinking OAB for some reason, no, lots of tiny options for customizing the appearance of the game aren't that bad. We'd need a little bit of new markup though, or some other way of defining the "non-directional" animations for units - the animation that'll get used when a unit with directional animations is used with the directional animation options off.

EDIT: I guess the southeast attack could be used when directional animations are turned off, although there are some potential problem cases, for example the lightning animation for Delfador - it clearly isn't a directional animation as such, since the man himself doesn't turn, but directional stuff is used to position the lightning on top of the enemy. So just using the southeast attack would probably work in most cases, but there are a few exceptions where there needs to be the possibility of displaying animations that are technically directional animations even when the option is turned off.
Last edited by zookeeper on June 24th, 2006, 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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turin
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Post by turin »

zookeeper wrote:Although, I wouldn't be surprised if directional standing caused units to generally become too difficult to recognize. In which case, directional standing (except in fights) would obviously need to be removed anyway.
I would, in fact, be very (pleasantly) surprised if they did NOT cause units to generally become too difficult to recognize. Especially since for many units, what differentiates them for the most part is not their gear, really, but their pose.

However, we can have it so the units always face SE or SW and still use directional frames, for attacking, moving, etc.
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Post by scott »

zookeeper wrote:Option for turning off walking animations sounds good. Perhaps more options for turning on and off all of this this fancy animation stuff (directional standing, directional combat) would be good. And if you're thinking OAB for some reason, no, lots of tiny options for customizing the appearance of the game aren't that bad.
Think of how many (at least a couple) of graphical bugs appear when just acceleration is turned on. Some have been fixed; some persist. And this is with a useful and popular option that I personally find indispensable. Even that option is bad (but not so bad as to eliminate it!). I'm not sure what this even adds to the game.
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Post by Boucman »

scott:

I play at normal speed, I don't see accelerated bugs....

please report these prior to 1.2 ;)
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Post by scott »

You have already handled most of them: last-frame-freeze, leadership-frame-freeze, hex jumping, frame-skipping, frame-synch, etc. I think most of them have been reported. But, I hope it still helps support my point.
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Post by Jetrel »

scott wrote:You have already handled most of them: last-frame-freeze, leadership-frame-freeze, hex jumping, frame-skipping, frame-synch, etc. I think most of them have been reported. But, I hope it still helps support my point.

In an ideal world /slash/ code, each of these options would simply result in a conditional when the game went to the drawing phase - the drawing code would literally still be calculating which frame it was supposed to be drawing in the animation cycle (say, for walking), it'd just show the single frame instead.

:? Of course, I have no idea what the inside of our sprite engine looks like. Right now, I don't really care, either - I'm going to go back to team-coloring the elves/finishing the attack icons, and will concern myself with this later.

8) It's probably not a good idea to throw down any ultimatums before 1.2, although getting all the ideas on the table is.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Bump, resurrect.

I thought about starting a new thread, but since most of what my request would entail would be art-related, continuing here seems more appropriate.

The idea: make the engine set the preprocessor symbol DEV_FEATURE (or something similar, I don't care about the name) in trunk and development releases. For stable releases (and release candidates) this wouldn't get set. Now, using this symbol, I can easily isolate experimental animations and other WML features to only appear when running a development release/branch. This should be highly useful when starting to add things like standing animations, since the game will look very silly for a long time when it only has a part of the units waving their flags and capes in the wind. Looking silly because of things like that is ok in the development releases, but not in stable ones. So, we'd just put the standing animations inside an #ifdef DEV_RELEASE until they're all (or most of them) done. When they're mostly done and thus worthy of being in a stable release, it would be trivial to remove that #ifdef condition. Nothing would be excluded from appearing in the dev releases, but if we only had 10 standing animations, they semi-automatically wouldn't appear in a stable release, which is as it should be. All assets such as the actual standing animation .png's and the WML for the animations would still be included in the stable releases, so for example contributor artists could easily work on standing animations using their stable installation as a base.

I can handle the WML (isolation of experimental stuff) side if someone handles the C++ side (which should be very trivial). Standing animations are probably the most important thing to start using this feature for, and I'd rather have this implemented first before going to war about whether it should also be used for the only movement animation in the game and other things like that.
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Post by Eleazar »

zookeeper wrote:This should be highly useful when starting to add things like standing animations, since the game will look very silly for a long time when it only has a part of the units waving their flags and capes in the wind.
I disagree that this is a problem in most cases. Adding a well animated (movement/attack/death/idle/whatever) enhances the game, no matter how many of the same type there are. Most player when they see the gryphon fly, think "cool... will he survive this attack?", not "hrumph. only 1 of my units has an animated movement, i'm gonna go play freeciv where everything is consistently un-animated." If we are lucky somebody will think "hey the gryphon animations is cool, i bet i could animate the same thing for the bat!"

I don't think there's been a major release which really had a consistent level of graphic quality. While we try to bring a certain level of polish to our new releases, Wesnoth is an eternal WIP. Trying to hide that fact by withholding new, cooler content, just doesn't do any good.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Eleazar wrote:
zookeeper wrote:This should be highly useful when starting to add things like standing animations, since the game will look very silly for a long time when it only has a part of the units waving their flags and capes in the wind.
I disagree that this is a problem in most cases.
Like in what cases? I was talking about standing animations, a fact which you conveniently seemed to ignore. You can't really argue that it wouldn't look confusing and weird if half of the units you see on the map are animated when just standing there while the rest aren't, right?

In case it for some reason wasn't clear, I meant that this should initially be applied to standing animations (as soon as we get any), and that it's another matter if we want to apply it to any other animation types (which probably won't happen, since everyone else seems to be opposed to such things).
Eleazar wrote:I don't think there's been a major release which really had a consistent level of graphic quality. While we try to bring a certain level of polish to our new releases, Wesnoth is an eternal WIP.
Being an eternal WIP has nothing to do with this.
Eleazar wrote:Trying to hide that fact by withholding new, cooler content, just doesn't do any good.
Yes it does: it makes the stable content consistent. The artists will also still have their playground, so there is no harm there. Showing the average stable player the current state of every new fancy and incomplete idea doesn't do any good, either. If the experience of the game of the average player doesn't matter much (devs make the game for themselves and so on), then why would the artists care if the average player sees or doesn't see every flashy pixel they make (answer: they wouldn't)? Inspiring potential contributors doesn't really strike me as a good argument, since they'd still have plenty enough of inspiration, and would get to know about the extra stuff as soon as they started using the forums.

If you think you can counter some of my arguments here, then please do so by assuming that I'm only talking of standing animations.
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