Bruce Lee

[Stwelin]

While the animation looks solid, the x displacement is not the same for each frame. If the player was moving 'X' amount to the right in each step, the result would not look like that animation, explaination below



Also, the slight headbob in the animation does not make up for the distance difference between frames.

[Helm]

The x displacement doesn't have to be the same for each frame.

Let's hear it from Mad when he's around, as he's coded/ing this engine and has others before it. always robustly.

[ptoing]

Again, agree with Helm, linear walks = wrong in all cases, liberties can be taken, as he stated, for cartoony stuff, but never 100% linear.

I started making this before I saw Helm's, but it's more complex and I will write a bit about it.



The top one is moved linear (as linear as Promotion wanted to make it) according to the center of the sprite (shown by the dots at the top, 2 pixels wide because it's an even number of pixels wide)

The bottom one is moved according to where the feet are on the ground.

If you look at the top one it looks like he is moving his legs but suspended from an invisible metal bar stuck in his head which moves at a constant speed = unnatural.

At the bottom I have the footsteps seperate so you can see how the top one slides around like mad.

[Madgarden]

I'm here! Personally, I am going to go with the "glide" option for the more arcadey feel. Actually, you're never going to see Brucey moving much on the screen due to scrolling, and so the issue is almost a moot one, but...

WTF... ?! Did I just see Bruce up above in the banner? Heh.

Uh, where was I. Oh yes. Unless you have an large number of frames, then you get a jerky update on the sprite movement, where the whole body jumps by a large amount each frame. This more appropriate, IMO, for something like Prince of Persia or Karateka where movement and positioning is intended to be exact. With an arcadey game, though, IMO it should be as liquid as possible on-screen. Jerky movement also complicates collision detection, as it's possible to "jump" through a collision hotspot or what have you. So, gliding is usually what you get in most games.

However, if you calculate the horizontal movement rate based on the animation speed and resulting distance between strides over time, as you guys have analyzed in previous posts, then your character will still travel the same distance as with the jerky update method, but with the smooth motion. The feet slide a little, but it's forgivable. This is what I've done for SAKFU, and really I don't see it as "gliding" around much. A lot of that has to do with the animation too.

If you *do* have a lot of frames for your walking/running animation, then even though it looks better with the "jerky" movement method than a lower frame count does, it's still worthwhile, IMO, to use the glide motion because the gliding will be even less apparent due to the high frame rate. Apparent sliding is minimal. The feet will appear to be properly placed, especially when scrolling; which, by the way, cancels out the exact-foot-placement effect anyway using the jerky method. You can't scroll jerkily without making people sick.

Anyway, that's my take on it... smoothness over exact placement, but with effort spent on matching the rate of movement to the animation. I may need to fix up Bruce's foot placement some more to make the linear motion correct, but again, with the scrolling it's probably not necessary. JUST KICK STUFF!

EDIT:

I'm modifying the animation as we speak to square up the distance of the steps in each frame... post shortly.

Here:


I've also raised him up an extra pixel in the middle of his stride to smooth out the vertical motion.

[Terley]

awesome 

[ptoing]

One thing I noticed that is not that good is that the leg frames are almost congruent. As in legs from frames 1 and 5 overlay perfectly. Even in a sideon sprite this should never be the case (unless it's one colour and you only use half a walkcycle)

[Madgarden]

This is true, as far as being common practice for video game sprites. I can try lifting up the rear foot by 1 pixel, or forward/backward by 1, and also adjust the shading further (though there's not much room there with 2 shades to work with). Do you have any specific suggestions?

I need to get into demo-mode very soon though, so these sorts of tweaks may have to wait 'til later. 

[MadToaster]

Again, agree with Helm, linear walks = wrong in all cases, liberties can be taken, as he stated, for cartoony stuff, but never 100% linear.

I started making this before I saw Helm's, but it's more complex and I will write a bit about it.



The top one is moved linear (as linear as Promotion wanted to make it) according to the center of the sprite (shown by the dots at the top, 2 pixels wide because it's an even number of pixels wide)

The bottom one is moved according to where the feet are on the ground.

If you look at the top one it looks like he is moving his legs but suspended from an invisible metal bar stuck in his head which moves at a constant speed = unnatural.

At the bottom I have the footsteps seperate so you can see how the top one slides around like mad.

It never occured to me that walking wasn't a linear motion until I saw this. Most video game guys you see sliding around but I played capcom's alien vs predator today and Schaefer has a really neat stompy walk cycle. How would you go about maintaining that sort've thing in a game? I figure you'd have to store displacement with each frame instead of some fixed iteration on the x axis.

[huZba]

It can work someplaces. Mostly cartoony stuff with lots of inertia like Sonic games etc. You picked a wrong example with castlevania because I finished POR on DS and loved it to bits BUT the freakin' walk-cycles. They're so bad. Not only do they glide, not only they're oversmoothed, not only are the actual runs extremely artifical and silly, they're also SEMI-SIDEWAYS. On a fully side-ways, no perspective platformer. They're humanoid, and look very bad.

Haha, personally i really liked how they moved kind of gracefully as if not even touching the ground. It made the controls feel really smooth and precise. I think it's more of a gameplay decision since in some previous games the walk cycles were exact and solid and looked really nice, but the controls were really clunky for me at least. They probably wanted the character to move faster but still wanted to keep the rather slow walk animation. Also i think the sideways thing looks better than something flyswatted. They probably wanted that just to make the character strike a cool pose when idle and to have more room to play with stuff like the clothes flowing around the legs and so forth. The DS games had a lot of things that sought to break the swatted-flat feel from the snes games. Stuff like 3D backrounds that change perspective as you move and so forth.

Back to the original topic, i think it's really hard to match gameplay and animation issues. If the character walks in a linear fashion, you can have more precise feel of your characters speed and position relative to enemies, which is VERY important when were talking about hand-to-hand combat. But then again, more realistic stuff of course looks more solid.

[Helm]

flyswatted. They probably wanted that just to make the character strike a cool pose when idle and to have more room to play with stuff like the clothes flowing around the legs and so forth. The DS games had a lot of things that sought to break the swatted-flat feel from the snes games. Stuff like 3D backrounds that change perspective as you move and so forth.

There was nothing flyswatted by a proper sideways walkcycle. You're abusing the term. And striking 'cool poses' all the time is what makes Castlevania games aggravating some times for all the nice gameplay.