Things we need help with:
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Things we need help with:
This is a list of major projects we're working on, all of which our code currently supports, and which we need images created for. Though it's certainly fun for people to create all sorts of grand new content (such as new units), in order to make our game better overall, we really need to enhance the content that is currently in-game, primarily by providing new animations. Though it might not seem as exciting, up-front, as the creation of new units, working on this is probably the best thing for new contributors to do, because if the images are well-drawn, it nearly guarantees their inclusion in-game. It's also means that everyone who plays wesnoth will see your work, which is certainly not the case for custom graphics made for a campaign.
We really appreciate the help, and the lead artists are much more willing to use their extremely limited free time to teach people if those people are working on the core of the game, rather than on some peripheral feature.
With all animations, the best thing is to do it right the first time. We don't want little "placeholder" animations; they do no good because they don't look significantly better than no animation at all, and they typically don't save anyone time when the animation has to be redone later. If you pour in the effort and get something done right in the first place, it will never have to be done over again, and it will actually look good. Practically every one of these animations will need at least four or five frames, minimum. It's at least an afternoon's work or so.
With many of these animation projects, the best thing to do is to "clone" an existing animation - if an animation of the right type exists for a very similar unit, you can copy in appropriate body parts to change the animation into one suitable for the new unit. This is similar to the process described here.
The following page can tell you where your image directory is located:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/EditingWesnoth
Boucman has provided a web page that lists how many of the following are done for each unit, which can be seen here:
http://wesnoth.slack.it/units.cgi?missing
As you can see, we don't have a lot done.
There are tutorials linked at this page which will help with all of these:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Create_Art
Death Animations
We would like each unit to have an animation of its death. Our code provides a simple, yet effective "fade-to-white" on the unit's standing frame, but when this is combined with a proper series of images made for the purpose, it looks much better - the fade-to-white is applied at the end of a hand-made "death animation". The caveat, of course, is that to properly supplement the fade-to-white animation, the death animation absolutely must have at least four frames. The basic reasoning behind this is quite simple - we need at least more than half a second of animation, and the slowest speed that frames can be cycled at is about 200ms per frame - even that is pushing it, really. To be honest, we'd really prefer that death animations last at least a good second or two, which requires a great deal more images. This means that it's really best if we have roughly eight frames for a death animation. This might seem steep, but if the animation is so short that no one notices it, why bother making it in the first place?
For most units, this should be rather mundane - the unit should simply fall to the ground. For inhuman and inherently magical units, however, we can play around a bit, making some very interesting and wild-looking animations. A drake, for example, might incinerate upon its death.
For examples of images to imitate, look at the death animations of the elvish archer and human duelist/fencer.
Attack animations
We would like to switch our current system of unit animations towards having much more articulated animations, designed for every direction. Right now most units only have a single frame or so, we would like to have about four frames per animation, and animations for every major direction. Very often, animations can be used for similar directions (this is often true for the nw and sw animations, for one example). The horizontally oriented animations can also be mirrored, and the result is that a unit will only need three or four unique animations (generally three for slashing weapons, and four for thrusting weapons).
Team Colorization
Currently being done in this thread: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 6&start=30 Unlike most of the other projects, the design-work on this, that is, the changing of the individual units to be team-colored, is something that I have to do myself. This is a fairly easy project to do, though - if you want to work on it, volunteer in that thread, and we'd be happy to have your help.
We really appreciate the help, and the lead artists are much more willing to use their extremely limited free time to teach people if those people are working on the core of the game, rather than on some peripheral feature.
With all animations, the best thing is to do it right the first time. We don't want little "placeholder" animations; they do no good because they don't look significantly better than no animation at all, and they typically don't save anyone time when the animation has to be redone later. If you pour in the effort and get something done right in the first place, it will never have to be done over again, and it will actually look good. Practically every one of these animations will need at least four or five frames, minimum. It's at least an afternoon's work or so.
With many of these animation projects, the best thing to do is to "clone" an existing animation - if an animation of the right type exists for a very similar unit, you can copy in appropriate body parts to change the animation into one suitable for the new unit. This is similar to the process described here.
The following page can tell you where your image directory is located:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/EditingWesnoth
Boucman has provided a web page that lists how many of the following are done for each unit, which can be seen here:
http://wesnoth.slack.it/units.cgi?missing
As you can see, we don't have a lot done.
There are tutorials linked at this page which will help with all of these:
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Create_Art
Death Animations
We would like each unit to have an animation of its death. Our code provides a simple, yet effective "fade-to-white" on the unit's standing frame, but when this is combined with a proper series of images made for the purpose, it looks much better - the fade-to-white is applied at the end of a hand-made "death animation". The caveat, of course, is that to properly supplement the fade-to-white animation, the death animation absolutely must have at least four frames. The basic reasoning behind this is quite simple - we need at least more than half a second of animation, and the slowest speed that frames can be cycled at is about 200ms per frame - even that is pushing it, really. To be honest, we'd really prefer that death animations last at least a good second or two, which requires a great deal more images. This means that it's really best if we have roughly eight frames for a death animation. This might seem steep, but if the animation is so short that no one notices it, why bother making it in the first place?
For most units, this should be rather mundane - the unit should simply fall to the ground. For inhuman and inherently magical units, however, we can play around a bit, making some very interesting and wild-looking animations. A drake, for example, might incinerate upon its death.
For examples of images to imitate, look at the death animations of the elvish archer and human duelist/fencer.
Attack animations
We would like to switch our current system of unit animations towards having much more articulated animations, designed for every direction. Right now most units only have a single frame or so, we would like to have about four frames per animation, and animations for every major direction. Very often, animations can be used for similar directions (this is often true for the nw and sw animations, for one example). The horizontally oriented animations can also be mirrored, and the result is that a unit will only need three or four unique animations (generally three for slashing weapons, and four for thrusting weapons).
Team Colorization
Currently being done in this thread: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 6&start=30 Unlike most of the other projects, the design-work on this, that is, the changing of the individual units to be team-colored, is something that I have to do myself. This is a fairly easy project to do, though - if you want to work on it, volunteer in that thread, and we'd be happy to have your help.
Unstickied for the foreseeable future, contents appended to "read me first".
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