The Mana World Forums

Hi,

What about crawling, strafing (along a cliff), and jumping ?

Should we set a priority order to the accepted ones?

Regards,

Bertram wrote:Hi,

What about crawling, strafing (along a cliff), and jumping ?

No, no and no.

Remember, every additional animation means additional work for every single equipment graphic

We can pull off (skill related) potential jumping and other unlikely skenarios by abusing already existing playerset and hence equipmentset positions. Let's cross the bridge when we get there.

For now, I'm waiting to see the one handed vertical swing and the two handed vertical swing to come into life.

As for mirroring, it is already used on the playerset and cannot be fixed without breaking equipment.
We should avoid mirroring.

Don't worry about existing equipment, as you're breaking them anyways.

bcs86 wrote:We should avoid mirroring.

Can you show me any commercial sprite-based game which does not take this shortcut?

Crush wrote:Can you show me any commercial sprite-based game which does not take this shortcut?

We would only be surpassing them.

Once equipment is drawn, the sprites of the animation are set in stone.

Anyhow

Crush wrote:My philosophy is that the people who get the actual work done should always have the last word in case of a discussion deadlock.

Crush,

such as the Commander Keen series, famous in their days for their high-quality (for EGA standards) graphics?

Anyway, saying `no one else does it' or `everyone else does it' is never an acceptable excuse for anything. Almost all the other MMORPGs charge monthly fees or sell ad space or microfee-items; we don't do that. Almost all the other free software games have ridiculously poor graphics and audio (Wesnoth, Allacrost, and some of Grumbel's work being the noteworthy exceptions), we make a point of polishing graphics and revisiting old crappy ones whenever we have the resources for that.

Considering that tmw uses a comparatively expensive perspective already (compared to the the lighting-from-above 30 degree isometric perspective, which should be the cheapest one, IMO,) I question the merit of mirroring as a shortcut particularly since you can usually mirror the outlined and coloured version of a sprite and only have to re-do the shading. That being said, I don't have as much experience in pixelling multidirectional spritesheets as you do, so my estimates may be wrong. Either way, most of our equipment (to the best of my recollection) currently does not use mirroring, so mirroring more would not aid the visual coherency of the game.

I would say that bc86's `You should not use mirroring' is the diplomatic solution: encourage artists not to mirror, which yields better graphics, while permitting them to mirror if they're in a rush or prefer that for other reasons. (Why they should be in a rush is a separate question-- tmw is not a commercial game that has to meet deadlines or run out of funding.)

-- fate

I still believe that it is a mistake with long-term impact not to use mirroring in the player spriteset but when you insist on it I won't stay in your way.

I'm not shure if I understand you right. Do you mean it's wrong to mirror any graphic? Here an example:



The first picture shows the archer animation. By mirroring that the player uses not the same hand on both graphics. I understand this argument against mirroring.



The second picture shows a simple walking animation. I see no reason what's wrong with mirroring that.

Hi,

As Spit pointed out, we 'could' make use of mirroring when there is no impact, as long as someone can see if there is none.

About the walking animation, won't mirroring bother if we draw a sword or a bow in hand, when equipped?
For now, the weapon just magically appears when attacking, and I truly think it's inconsistent, and you?

Crush made me remind of something to ask about the playerset:
Can someone bring back the hurt frames? When the movement protocol will be moved beyond
network specific handlers, and upgraded for TMWserv, I had plans to bring back the hurt effect for TMWserv,
and make it optional, as Rotonen requested.
Would it be possible?

Thanks in advance and best regards,

Bertram wrote: About the walking animation, won't mirroring bother if we draw a sword or a bow in hand, when equipped?
For now, the weapon just magically appears when attacking, and I truly think it's inconsistent, and you?

That can be fixed by drawing the equipement sprites for weapons/shileds in the appropriate hand so there's still no need not to mirror the player walking sprite.

Ok,

That can be fixed by drawing the equipment sprites for weapons/shields in the appropriate hand so there's still no need not to mirror the player walking sprite.

I just pointed out to raise the weapon not displayed while walking fact

Is everyone for a hurt system back?

If we decide to mirror some of sprites we should have client side mechanism to do that. Tag MIRROR or something in XML definitions of spriteset. Some ages ago we decided to not mirror, but actually that changes nothing. Content quality grow achieved by not mirroring is insignificant, and rather not noticeable by most of non-devs players. However it's a nice goal to have everything made in "proper" way. We all know that we need many different player poses to fight weapons, to make doges, taking other actions like mentioned jump or crawl. Cutting down animation frame rate hurts our eyes, but not cutting them consumes a lot more of our time.

So if we decide to mirror some of player poses, I'm ok with that.

Bertram wrote:Can someone bring back the hurt frames?

One frame effects like HURT and DOGE would be nice. If we decide to mirror them it's only 6 additional frames. Also body pose may be the same, the face expression may be different. That reduces equipment frame count to 3.

Hi Irukard,

I'm plainly agree with you.

The mirror tag is really easy to handle in OpenGL, and a little less in SDL. (I'm just caring about FPS drop).
A cache system must anyway be done to get such nice and useful effects.

As for the hurt, dodge frames, there is already a project to separate the head draw from the body one (in order to get more face possibilities, and else) and could be then used to help separate dodge with hurt.
(I even thought we could separate the eyes in order to permit choosing the eyes colors, permitting them to blink, move while being idle, etc... But maybe that's another story.)

So, once again, could we readd the hurt frames, as it would give us possible extra dodge frames with a different face?

Regards.