Animated Deaths Implemented

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Dave
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Animated Deaths Implemented

Post by Dave »

As proposed on this thread: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4489 (and numerous places elsewhere), I have implemented support for animated deaths. I think that we have enough people who have expressed interest in working on this that we will actually be able to get good enough animations for our units to make the feature worthwhile.

I have included turin's animations for the skeleton and revenant as demonstrations of how things work. I didn't include any of xJapan's animations, because he didn't provide them in the correct format. It'd be great if someone could convert them though. :)

Animations can have any number of frames. Multiple death animations can be used, with one being chosen at random, and one can select death animations based on the damage type of the killing attack (e.g. a fire attack might result in a different animation to a blade attack).

It'd be great if artists could start doing death animations and post them in this thread (or in a new thread), and if developers could start adding them to the game. :)

David
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Post by quartex »

Thanks for going ahead and implementing this Dave. I thought this idea was really cool. I was sad when artistic work on this topic seemed to peter off.

I think we should agree on a standard for the number of death frames. For simplicity's sake, I think 2 is enough, showing the unit falling and collapsed on the ground. I'd rather see 2 frames for all the units, then 4 to 5 frames for half of them.
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Post by Dave »

quartex wrote: I think we should agree on a standard for the number of death frames. For simplicity's sake, I think 2 is enough, showing the unit falling and collapsed on the ground.
I think two is alot better than none, and the two that turin did for the skeleton and revenant look nice. However I think it depends on the unit, just like any other animation, and that it should be left at the artist's discretion.
quartex wrote: I'd rather see 2 frames for all the units, then 4 to 5 frames for half of them.
So would I, but I don't think that trying to limit people to two frames would help with this. Just let people contribute how they want -- if someone wants to do incredibly detailed death animations for, say, Drakes, we shouldn't tell them "you should have done more units with less detail!"

On the other hand, if someone provides some nice two-frame animations, we shouldn't tell them "those aren't good enough! We won't accept the animations unless they have five nice smooth frames!"

David
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Post by quartex »

What's the syntax for adding the death animations to a unit's file? I checked the CVS wesnoth web page ( http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/view ... ata/units/) for the skeleton and revenant.cfg files and couldn't find any examples of adding the death frames.

Is it just:
[die]
[frame]
...
[/frame]
[frame]
...
[/frame]
[/die]
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Post by Dave »

Ooops...forgot to actually commit the .cfg files. They are committed now.

It's like you said, quartex, except [death] instead of [die].

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Post by scott »

Stupid question, but the timing still is based on when the attack hits, right?
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Post by Dave »

scott wrote:Stupid question, but the timing still is based on when the attack hits, right?
Actually no. The time should simply start from 0. If you start your animation from another time, say x, Wesnoth will map everything to being 0 based by subtracting x from all the times in the animation.

If a unit has a defense animation, the defense animation will play in full, followed by the death animation.

David
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Post by Burnsaber »

If i [kill] unit will it show the death animations?

Edit; If not, it might be a usefull feature to have something like Death_animation=yes/no key inside [kill]. You know.. dramatic deaths.
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Post by Elvish_Pillager »

Burnsaber wrote:If i [kill] unit will it show the death animations?

Edit; If not, it might be a usefull feature to have something like Death_animation=yes/no key inside [kill]. You know.. dramatic deaths.
[kill] already has an "animate=" key.
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Post by Doros »

When I first read about these animations, I thought they would only be a minor improvement, but after playing 0.9 for a while, I must say that it looks better. Fighting the undead looks really cool now.
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Post by turin »

Doros wrote:When I first read about these animations, I thought they would only be a minor improvement, but after playing 0.9 for a while, I must say that it looks better. Fighting the undead looks really cool now.
Agreed! :D

Although it seems only a few of the units have animations. :( Do we have a list of the undead units that have them, and one of those that don't?
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Post by Elvish_Pillager »

Higher level units' death animations should take longer. It fits better with the significance of the event.
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Post by turin »

Elvish Pillager wrote:Higher level units' death animations should take longer. It fits better with the significance of the event.
That should be easy enough, but first we need the animations for the higher level units! :) *cough**cough*.


In any case, here's one for the skeleton archer; I don't want to commit it (I always mess up when committing images), but it would be great if someone else could.
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Post by quartex »

From the 0.9.1-CVS changelog:

* new death animations for:
* Ancient_Lich.cfg, Ancient_Wose.cfg, Arch_Mage.cfg, Assassin.cfg, Bandit.cfg, Battle_Princess.cfg, Blood_Bat.cfg, Bone_Shooter.cfg, Bowman.cfg, Cavalier.cfg, Cavalryman.cfg

I don't know who did the artwork, but I'm extatic to see so many units getting death animations. After being talking about for such a long time, it's nice to see death animations actually get drawn and implemented.
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A word of caution for deaths of 'heroic' units

Post by Simons Mith »

There are a few - admittedly very rare - occasions where a defeated unit doesn't die but is captured. I don't know if alternate death animations are possible - but if they aren't, anyone animating these units needs to ensure they don't suffer too badly. For these characters, getting stabbed might be OK; but having their head chopped off would be a bad idea. Not even Monty Python's Black Knight had his head chopped off.

Another point where an alternate animation might be usable in future is when a unit turns into a zombie. At present I'd expect to see the death animation followed by the Zombie-summoning animation. However if someone drew a turning-into-a-zombie animation that would short-circuit this.
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