Suggestion: More frames in Animation Loops

[Anarcho]

First of all, if this has come up before, I apologize.  I didn't see it mentioned in the suggestion tracker.

Is there any way to increase the number of frames that are allowed in each animation loop?  I would find this particularly useful for idle and talking animations, as I inevitably run out of frames when putting together something complex.  With most animations, you can always continue through to the next loop, but with idle animations you need to be able to go back to the beginning and repeat, and talking animations each have their own front/back/left/right views so you can't continue to the next loop.  I've had to cut out certain actions or gestures several times because there weren't enough available frames.

Maybe I'm way off base and there are ways to do this without changes to the engine, but if not I would love to see this improvement.

[Pumaman]

This is a possibility to implement -- I can see why you might want lengthy idle anims that won't fit in 20 frames. However it won't happen for the next version I'm afraid.

Would anyone else find this useful?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Yeah, I would. The artist I'm working with at the mo has a very nasty habit of making great and lenghty animations. : As regards idles we've found a way to split it down, and he's also been careful to make 20 frame animations for that, but he has to cut down in order to do it. I feel like a fascist censoring him. Ok, I don't, actually, but it seemed like a cool thing to write at the moment.

Plus, thanks to his lengthy (but great! I wouldn't want to lose a single frame!) animations, I have 5 loops in each view which are 3/4 frames long, animations started in previous loops. Bit of a waste, methinks, even though there IS a VERY high limit for views which I don't think I'll meet anytime soon.

BTW, since we're at it, how does more loops in each view sound? Ok, ok, shutting up.

[monkey0506]

And perhaps you could custom define the view (up, down, left, right, up-right, etc.) that a given loop would fill via a drop down menu, that way if someone only wanted, say, left and right loops, they could do that, but someone who wanted only up and down loops could do this as well.  Instead of the built-in U D L R UL UR DL DR loops (the order is probably wrong here, but I think I make it clear what I mean).  And if this was done then "continuing to the next loop" wouldn't mean that you would have to sacrifice a loop...it could be locked into whatever the first loop was set to...

But increasing FPL (frames per loop) would be nice.

[Bernie]

I'd find more frames per loop very useful, too.

Since we're on the topic, would it be possible to make a button of sorts to set all frames in a loop to a certain speed?

Another interesting idea would be 'loop areas', where we could specify a range of frames the animation would keep looping if the loop boolean has been passed as 1, and maybe for walk and talk animations, too (could be a game option). That way, animations could have an intro and outro, allowing for smoother transitions. This can be coded to some extent (I've done that for my game), but it uses up so many frame loops.

EDIT - The last suggestion is already in the tracker. Sorry~

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=472

[Gregjazz]

Loop areas sounds cool, but it's pretty specific, and kinda complicated. I've always coded it myself and never had any problems with that.

More frames would be nice. What I like doing is putting all my direction-independent character animations in the same view as the walking animations. That way no "changeview" is required, I can just go straight to a AnimateCharacter.

[Bernie]

Loop areas sounds cool, but it's pretty specific, and kinda complicated. I've always coded it myself and never had any problems with that.

I wouldn't find setting two or three values per loop very complicated. Also, I'm not sure why it would be much more specific than the coded version. Wouldn't the result be the same? If it were integrated in AGS, we could make easy use of it during idle animations, too. Would look great during animated background speech and on walkcycles.

I sounds like it would be hard to implement into AGS, though.

[strazer]

What I like doing is putting all my direction-independent character animations in the same view as the walking animations. That way no "changeview" is required, I can just go straight to a AnimateCharacter.

The Character.ChangeView function is intended for permanently changing a character's view. For animations, you are supposed to use Character.LockView before animating and Character.UnlockView after the animation has finished.

(Just a quick note to clarify things for any beginners reading this thread.)

[Gregjazz]

Hehe, you didn't hear that. No wonder I don't release any of my source code.

[Janik]

I would like to support the suggestion for increasing the # of frames per loop. In my case it's more for walking animations. I timed myself walking somewhat quickly, and it takes about 1.2 seconds per step. If I'm limited to 20 frames per step, that means the effective frame rate of the walking animation would be 15 or so frames per second - that's probably low enough to look less than fluid.

Since we're on the topic, would it be possible to make a button of sorts to set all frames in a loop to a certain speed?

That's a good idea too. Perhaps several frames could be selected with the mouse, and then a right-click mouse menu could have that option (to apply not to ALL frames, but the selection).

Thanks!

[strazer]

I timed myself walking somewhat quickly, and it takes about 1.2 seconds per step. If I'm limited to 20 frames per step, that means the effective frame rate of the walking animation would be 15 or so frames per second - that's probably low enough to look less than fluid.

Have you tried it? You'll be amazed what you can do with 15 frames.


10 frames

(made by big brother)

[Janik]

Impressive - very nice animation! I'm still in the very early stages of preparation, but my game will most likely be at fairly high resolution (800x600) so the sprites would be bigger in terms of pixels, and then it would show up more. But no, I haven't tried it. It's just nice to have options 

[antineff]

Just to warm it up again!

I'm in need for more frames per loop and I see a lot of people are for quite a long time, but the option is still not implemented.

Did anybody find out a workaround for displaying longer looping animations in the meantime?

[strazer]

If you're talking about normal animations, not walking animations, you can check the "Run next loop after this" checkbox in the view editor to create a long animation. Do you have problems with looping these? What version of AGS are you using?

[antineff]

Thank you Strazer, I didn't know it would work that way. But it does!

[don_tomaso]

well, for the record, more frames for animation would be GREAT!

[strazer]

I guess it deserves its own tracker entry: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=568

[Sola]

a special request to CJ, Would it be possible to increase the number of frames from 20 to 30? Why? well, I use pre-rendered 3d graphics and it would take exactly 30 frames to get a smooth walk animation. If you were to see the demo I uploaded a while back you'd notice my character 'limps' and this is the result of using 20 frames which naturally would require an additional 10 frames to get that' fluid' movement.
It would be great if this came to pass.
God bless you CJ.

Edited by mod: This was brought up again not very long ago, topics merged. next time use the search function.

[Pumaman]

This is certainly under consideration but isn't an immediate priority I'm afraid.