They would be less in-your-face as in the example; I tried to test out all the little sparkle animations I made in one picture. But apparently it does do it's job: Get peoples attention to that specific sprite. On this picture it might be a bit much, especially considering that nothing else moves.
Now imagine a fort with 100 dwarves, pets, some wildlife and vermin running around, flowing water...
Other places I'm considering animations for my own personal sett (and that's just me, not Tarn or Mike, animations are pretty much a stretch goal so far. I just think it's fun to do.):
- Liquids like water/magma.
- Fire/Smoke.
- Tree leaves/Grass tufts gently swaying in the wind.
- Flower buds opening. (2-3 frames, then stay get a still image. Better than grass that suddenly pops up fully grown flowers)
- Workshops currently in use.
- Glows, for example glowworms or the embers in a forge.
- Machinery currently in use. (It already does that)
- Creature Idle animation. (There is a reason most old-school RPGs have gently bobbing/breathing creatures, makes them stand apart from the static terrain)
- Rain drops.
- Hives with single pixel ants/bees buzzing around.
- Mining/Woodchopping/Engraving with single pixel particles of rock or wood chips flying around.
- Sparks/Blood pixels flying around when a unit gets hit in combat.
- Plants growing in farmplots in stages. (Guess that counts as a very slow animation?)
- Smell from rotting food/bodyparts.
I'm aware that it's not to everyones liking, but for my own personal adaption or future tilesets, I'd certainly love to include animations. With TWBT they are causing instability; the Steam update fixes that issue.
I hope you get the time/funding to add all* of this. Creature idle animations are probably not too likely due to the sheer amount of extra frames, but something like fire would only take even one frame to change from the tremendously unsatisfying state of fire which doesn't move to that which does. And of course, additional frames would make it prettier.
Bamboo to replace the placeholder that was in the grass list earlier.
I won't beat around the bush, this is bad. Worse than the placeholder. It looks like someone cut a few short stalks of bamboo and stood them there. This is not what bamboo, which is a live plant and not a harvested item, looks like. I get that you probably live somewhere bamboo doesn't grow, but at least find some reference images. Here, I'll do it for you:
https://imgur.com/gallery/iI5EEJaI labeled appropriate species. Note that since this is not a multi-tile tree,
Bambusa oldhamii isn't what we're looking for, and I reckon that if you did look for reference pictures, some old growth forest of that is probably what steered you wrong. At least, unless there was photos of that only showing the trunks and not canopy, I can't think what else would have. But it's very obviously not the species meant to be represented. I put some good grass-like candidates for reference at the top (three images) and the rest, I think, would count more as plants or impassible sapling-type tiles, but I included them since it seems you have no conception of what live bamboo looks like in general.
Also, I'm not sure what you were meaning to represent with the color differences there. Live bamboo is green, and a stand of bamboo will normally have a mixture of live green and dead yellow (shaded out) stalks, the former of which will have a lot more leaves than depicted (as well as having tops), and the latter of which has no leaves but retains the twigs and branches from when it did. I don't think I've ever seen stalks in that grey-brown color.
Mcipher: We discussed this. I'm not sure where we stand atm, but Mike is more of the opinion "lets use fewer pre-set colors that look good", while I lean towards the "lets use perfect representation of the raw values". We have to see and test everything ingame before we can see how horrid that would look or not.
Grass growths. (Ignore the one static grass, it slipped in by accident)
- Babytoe succulents
- Pebble plant
- Meadowsweet
- Rush
- Marsh Thistle
- Cottongrass
- Ignore, has no growths.
- Mountain avens
- Cloudberry
In general it goes "plant => plant + bud => plant + flower". Ingame the transition is staggered, invidivual tiles are slower/faster than the neighbours.
This stuff, on the other hand turned out a lot better. There's sort of an issue of density since plants don't just distribute themselves evenly over a field like this, but are either random (with heterogeneous spacing) or clumped. Only large woody things like trees have a strong enough murderous effect on their neighbors and live long enough for empty gaps to get filled in for the distribution seen in the meadowsweet, rush, marsh thistle, and cloudberry to be natural. Arguably the same is true of mountain avens but the different sizing achieves the same visual effect so it's fine. Other than that, the marsh thistle seems like it ought to be more magenta (their color isn't, overall, that dark) but honestly these flowers look great and I doubt most people would notice.
Oh, and the mountain aven flowers leave their shadows behind even when they're not there, but I assume that's just because these aren't finished.
* Maybe not sparks in battle since that's weird and doesn't happen outside of Hollywood
Author
Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 462205 times)