The Mana World Forums

of course we need really awesome effects for the most powerful skills, but how about all those little things like potions, minor skills, status effects, battle events and the like?

here are some things i made. the white background is only because animated gifs don't support alpha transparency. the original xcf files are alpha transparent, of course.

this could be some healing spell:

[XCF Source File]
[XCF Source File without filtering]

and this maybe some potion or a buff

[XCF Source File]

Me like... the healing spell most.
Though I think red isn't friendly enough for a healing spell. I prefer light blue. Coincidetally healing spells were light blue in most RPG's I think. Secret of Mana, Chronotrigger... and probably more.

Yet I hope we will have a nice particle engine to handle most spell effects in the future. With dynamic particle effects it's also easy to vary the effect according to the strength of the spell. Like making the effect last longer and using more particles to give the spell effect more density.
Ofcourse spells would be a lot more fluid with less work. Also spells can be partialy in front of and at the same time behind caster/target sprites without the need of drawing multiple synchronised animations. I have some experience with fiddling around with the Emitter class in the U2Editor (UT2003-2004 level editor), and believe me, we need particle effects.

The first effect, colored red could be used for some sort of bleed-removing skill. Green for poison-removing and blue or cyan for HP recovering.

I like them both .

actually i dont like the second one... it doesnt give me the "feel" that i use a potion or something

as you know i already made a rudimentary particle engine. but i wrote it in my own programming style that differs much from the style of the TMW sourcecode. to integrate the particle engine into the rest of the game engine in an elegant way is a quite complex task that can only be performed by the programmers who are really into the client sourcecode like bjorn or elven. unfortunately there are things that got a much higher priority, at the moment.

Modanung, why don't you write an article about the UT particle system on the wiki? it could be useful as a paradigm for our particle engine.


here the animation sequence of a single star so it could be used as a particle. in blue this time:

I think all we need is the largest sprite with full alpha for particle effects. As size and alpha can be easily varied.

Yea, maybe I'll write an article on the wiki some time soon about what I think a particle engine needs. And the pros and cons of the UT2003/4 system.

a spinning star:

could be useful for many different things. like some kind of dizzy status aligment (spinning around characters head), as an indicator for critical hits (flying away from target) or as a generic symbol of space property magic.

animation sequence:

I have to agree with Kinetic on the buff animation. (Reverse it and it could express eating..?)

Conceptualizing and experimenting on effects is nice, but shouldn't we have the particle engine in use before going into effects this deeply?

Rotonen, why are you always that negative? Your job as the head of art should be to motivate people and not to convince them to stop working and be lazy.

and no, i don't think that we have to wait for a working particle engine before making some effect animations.

1st there are many effects that don't need a particle engine but can be made by simple animations. and 2nd when the programmers make a particle engine they need somthing to test it.

Crush wrote:Rotonen, why are you always that negative? Your job as the head of art should be to motivate people and not to convince them to stop working and be lazy.

Rotonen doesn't want people to be lazy. He wants efficiency. Work shouldn't be done twice. Also other graphics have higher priorities and they should be done first.

Yet I think a few simple animations won't harm anyone. It's nice to have some visual effect until the particle engine is done.

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<rant>

Usually when I would have something positive to say, other people have already said it and I don't like to repeat things.
If I disagree with positive comments, you should know I will let you know it.

It might not seem like it, but I'm probably one of the most enthusiastic people about the effects and our plans to use a particle engine.
I just feel like we have priorities: I am a director, hence I try to direct you into the right direction. I am not a god, hence you shouldn't take my every world as an order, which should be implemented at a pace that would make the blitzkrieg seem like the work of snails.

Some of you are directors of your own areas of responsibility and hence you should try to direct people into working for your goals. Holding your own meetings wouldn't hurt either, I guess.

</rant>

Never think I don't appreciate your work and effort.

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i am currently programming an animated effect system for the tmw client. and yes, it works:

particles might take a little bit longer but i am very confident that version 0.0.20 will contain animated effects that follow objects or are at fixed world location.

is there maybe someone who feels creative and wants to make a "Level Up!" animation with prefereably 64x64 pixel and 10 frames?

I like both of them, specially the healing one.

Modanung wrote:Me like... the healing spell most.
Though I think red isn't friendly enough for a healing spell. I prefer light blue. Coincidetally healing spells were light blue in most RPG's I think. Secret of Mana, Chronotrigger... and probably more.

I don't relate color (red=bad or green/blue=good) with effect as much as I do with shape, fade and movement. Stars moving smoothly and fading away gives me the feeling that is something good, while I asociate attacks and curses with more violent animations.

Crush wrote:is there maybe someone who feels creative and wants to make a "Level Up!" animation with prefereably 64x64 pixel and 10 frames?

Why that? I thought we were looking for a particle system. I'm hopeful we will rewrite the animation system to provide variable number of frames per animation, and different delays between frames (as you suggested in the mailing list), so adding an animation above the others might not be worth it. Since you started writing your own particle engine could it maybe be more interesting to try to add this feature to the client, even if I'm sure many of us would like to work on this task or have got so many ideas. Anyway all your changes should be submitted in the form of a patch to our patch tracker so everyone could review them, PLEASE don't commit to CVS since it seems some people are not so much self confident with it and created many empty modules in our repo. I'm still investigating who did that and how to remove them (Unfortunately CVS doesn't allow modules removal so easily). Let's hope we could switch to SVN as soon as possible.