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[ungulateman]

I've made a couple of alterations to some of the sprites, which I don't have on my current computer, but will try to post soon. I've given the weaponsmith a dagger, the armorsmith a shield, and changed the elf's weapons to be all wood.

[Bloogonis]

I'd LOVE to have animated tiles/creature graphics in general!
Two-step animated dwarves would be hilarious to watch, especially when paused and forwarding time only with the . key (like I do in battles sometimes).
And you could make gems sparkle a bit. Or an animated fly-swarm. Or...

couldn't this already be done with the [alt tile] tag? it gives purring maggots an animation.

[Artanis00]

Animated tiles can be implemented so that the artist only has to use one single tile entry. You would not have to "use up" N tiles to make something which is animated.

Because the actual rendering is not the problem. The problem is that Toady is only providing enough information to specify "index 114". What the renderer chooses to do with that index is another story. It could cycle through four frames representing "index 114". The tileset could even be four .pngs, one for each frame.

Of course, that index could be ambiguous, like in the case of the spiderweb/currency tile. And you could not use this ability to cheat and get more actual unique tile entries, cause we're still stuck with the original tileset index #'s coming from Toady.

I just mean to say: There could be a shimmering animated coin, but it would have to be a shimmering/animated web as well.

-z

You could probably pull something off with color cycling. The channel magic that has been done in this thread for various tiles reminded me of it, but for crude animation you just need a way to cycle through colors rather than cycle through frames.

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5

[dyze]

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5

some insane art in that demo! love that era of graphics..

[McBeer]

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5

Holy damn, nice pieces there..
upd: wow, really wow. Neat bkgs and anim patterns..

btw, word about animated DF: it's just bad idea. This title should avoid it as long as possible.

[Ironhand]

Don't worry, I don't particularly find it appealing.

[Baughn]

So, I'm implementing animation.
What features would you like?

Yes, that's a completely open-ended question; I don't want to make you assume certain things are or aren't possible, though you would probably do well not to request anything that requires changes to DF proper.

[Foamy]

IS there any way of only having animations activate while the creature (or construction) is performing an action? The only place i see constant animations working are for vegetation and liquid.

[Baughn]

No, sorry. And you're right, liquids/grass are probably the only things they're likely to work for. Though I suppose having dwarves blink occasionally might be fun.

[Solace]

So, I'm implementing animation.
What features would you like?

Yes, that's a completely open-ended question; I don't want to make you assume certain things are or aren't possible, though you would probably do well not to request anything that requires changes to DF proper.

Well like I mentioned before, if we could choose for an animation to just display a single frame, we could use one animation to display several different still images, increasing the number of images we have to work with without increasing the indexes. If we could also have the computer pick a random still image out of the animation, that would allow, for example, to have several slightly different tree sprites (or grass, water, sand, whatever), without changing any of the basic code for dwarf fortress.

[Jayce]

You don't like nobles?

I'm actually really looking forward to them.
I think it'll be fun to make fancy clothes and hats.

Anyway, check it out. I made some more stuff:



I'm not sure I like the soldiers yet.
Skullcap-dwarf in particular doesn't do much for me.
I like the headband a lot better. Thanks for the suggestion!

My peasants are pretty nice, though, I think.
Check out that farmer hat. I'm proud of that one.

Is he a rice farmer?.
I used to use mayday exclusively,but after trying your set i kinda prefer it,though i miss the bigger images esp dwarfs.

[Cruxador]

So, I'm implementing animation.
What features would you like?

Yes, that's a completely open-ended question; I don't want to make you assume certain things are or aren't possible, though you would probably do well not to request anything that requires changes to DF proper.

Well like I mentioned before, if we could choose for an animation to just display a single frame, we could use one animation to display several different still images, increasing the number of images we have to work with without increasing the indexes. If we could also have the computer pick a random still image out of the animation, that would allow, for example, to have several slightly different tree sprites (or grass, water, sand, whatever), without changing any of the basic code for dwarf fortress.

The problem is, we'd need some way to specify what frame to use, and I don't think that's currently possible.

[Baughn]

Only problem with that would be avoiding having sprites mysteriously change as you scroll around.

I think I can get Toady to pass me the absolute map location, which would translate to knowing the absolute location of any given tile. If we use *that* as an index, things should look good. It would be on a separate axis from animation, though, essentially meaning we'd have (potentially) 4D tiles.

I'm also in the process of resurrecting the shader-mode output (and retiring many of the others; they're pointless nowadays), which would allow such tiles to be algorithmically generated in realtime; both the current time and absolute location will be available in the shader. (Using a shader is probably the only way to get enough horsepower for this without slowing DF down, and we wouldn't want *that*.)

[WormSlayer]

Love those colour-cycling pictures  - Massive nostalgia flashback to my Amiga days

Baughn: Just to clarify; All you get passed for rendering purposes is an ascii tile number and colours, no context as to what the tile is actually being used for?

Also, when you say your implementing animation, in what capacity? tileset.png will have multiple frames? Or every tile will be a separate .png with its own frames or what?

I guess the perfect ideal would be (the option of) separate animated sequences for every character and item, and every possible state.

But realistically, small looped animations of trees swaying and water rippling sort of stuff would be a good start.

The possibility of using shaders to generate tiles is interesting...

Also - Miasma/smoke/etc. - Any way to draw those with transparency over whatever is under that tile?

Edit: It's actually possible to imply some context about things from the tile number and colours. Dwarf status indicators for example?

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Indicator

[Baughn]

Baughn: Just to clarify; All you get passed for rendering purposes is an ascii tile number and colours, no context as to what the tile is actually being used for?

Correct.

Also, when you say your implementing animation, in what capacity? tileset.png will have multiple frames? Or every tile will be a separate .png with its own frames or what?

Well, that depends on exactly what is required. Making each frame of each tile a separate PNG, with a separate animation descriptor for the whole thing that lets you specify e.g. cycle speed, all stored in a tarball.. is an option. It really depends on what you ask for.

I guess the perfect ideal would be (the option of) separate animated sequences for every character and item, and every possible state.

But realistically, small looped animations of trees swaying and water rippling sort of stuff would be a good start.

Right. As mentioned, I don't actually get any state information at the moment. That might change later, of course, but right now all I get is "that's a hammerdwarf". I'm also inclined to think that using opengl shaders to generate the animation will probably give better results in a lot of cases.