Hi guys,
Binky and myself are having a problem with character walk speeds without anti-glide set.
Basically, our main character has a fair few walk frames in her animations (20 per direction), which means with anti-glide mode enabled she is coming out really jerky (we're guessing anti-glide is probably designed for lower numbers of walk frames). We turned it off and her animation is now nice and smooth, but we have found that the only sensible speed option for her and every other character is 1. Any higher and they move too fast, and we are unable to slow her down any more.
This also means that, due to the perspective our backgrounds are at, even with scaling the speed of movement, her up/down walk speed is way too fast. But as it is set to 1 we are unable to slow her down any.
So first, my question: Is there any way to either A) change the entire game #cycles per frame, thus giving us more choice for character speeds than 1, or B) Somehow slow the characters down, yet allow them to still obey walkable areas etc.
the ideal would be to have a floating point value for a character's walk speed, so for e.g. setting her walk speed to 0.5 would move her once every two frames, and so on and so forth.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
When using anti-glide mode, you'll find that some experimenting with Animation Speed is necessary. But I guarantee that between Walking Speed and Animation Speed, you'll find the perfect setting. :)
The thing is, the speed we get (movement and animation) using anti-glide mode is bang on. It's just that because our walk frames are 20 frames long apiece, and they're nice and dynamic, you lose a lot of the fluidity by only updating the motion when the frame changes - and therefore making redundant all the work on the animation.
When we turn off anti-glide mode, the animation looks lovely, but we hit this hurdle when moving up and down that we would need to set the speed to less than 1 for the speed and the animation to match (left and right is bang on).
Quote from: CaptainBinky on Wed 08/02/2006 16:27:14
When we turn off anti-glide mode, the animation looks lovely, but we hit this hurdle when moving up and down that we would need to set the speed to less than 1 for the speed and the animation to match (left and right is bang on).
Exactly.
Also, as I said originally, because anti-glide mode is a global thing that is either on or off, we only have one realistic choice for movement speed for EVERY character in the game: 1.
This means either every character in our game will have to have exactly the same walk speed, as well as really fast up/down walk speeds, or we lose the fluidity of the main character's walk cycle (the animation you will see most of the time playing the game) which we definitely don't want to do :)
99% of games use Anti-Glide mode on, so I'm wondering if there's a way you could sort out the animation to look good whilst keeping it enabled... if you set the animation speed of the character to something quite quick like 1 or 2, does it still look silly?
Quote from: Pumaman on Wed 08/02/2006 22:38:46
so I'm wondering if there's a way you could sort out the animation to look good whilst keeping it enabled...
The thing is, as I said with Anti-Glide mode on the animation speed and movement speed are bang-on. However because the position only updates when the frame changes, the character is "jumping" across the screen rather than "drifting" and therefore all the nice fluid effects of having a fairly smooth walk cycle are lost. I can see how using anti-glide mode on, say, and 8 frame walk cycle would be massively beneficial. However, our 20 frame cycle looks a million times better with anti-glide mode off.
We could, of course, just live with it. But that really would be a bit of a shame (especially given that I've already done all 180 frames of walk cycles for our main character) :)
Edit: In fact, somebody has written a module to allow sprites to be moved slower than 1, but that module doesn't support walkable areas and is therefore no good for the player character (or NPCs). Being able to use floating point speeds (and therefore 0.5, or 0.25) would totally address this issue.
Edit again: The crux of it all is that for low frame anims (say 8 frames), anti-glide mode is perfect. For high frame anims (say 30 or 40 frames) anti-glide mode is perfect, but somewhere in-between (15 - 20 frames) the animation is smooth enough to look fluid (when on the spot) but not smooth enough for anti-glide mode not to be jumpy.
Edit (last one honest): And yes, increasing the animation speed does make it look a bit silly.
This relates to this request on the tracker:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=73
I'll see what I can do.