Hi everyone!
Quick update on the status of each developer, and our current tasks / focus areas. But first, an animated Hydra with some lesser daemons to catch your eye ;)
The Official Blog for ADOM & ADOM II: Legends of Ancardia
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Monday, May 29, 2017
Sharks in ADOM
SPOILER ALERT: ADOM has sharks. And some other marine wildlife.
Sharks are one of those creatures where ASCII and graphical versions of the game are really at odds when it comes to how difficult it is to depict the creature.
In ASCII the shark looks roughly like this:
A
So that's pretty simple :) But as an animated graphical sprite the shark adds a very special challenge:
it moves in the "depth" plane rather than horizontally or vertically relative to the "camera". That means our limb-based movement animation is just no good. Custom frames are a must.
"Depth" (or z-axis) based movement is really tricky to get right. We want to get the sharks body to visibly bend, but at the same time the silhouette will remain largely unchanged. Not an easy feat!
On the upside the movement itself is pretty straightforward, so I can probably get away with just winging it instead of analyzing references in great detail (or so I hope! You be the judge ;))
Sharks are one of those creatures where ASCII and graphical versions of the game are really at odds when it comes to how difficult it is to depict the creature.
In ASCII the shark looks roughly like this:
A
So that's pretty simple :) But as an animated graphical sprite the shark adds a very special challenge:
it moves in the "depth" plane rather than horizontally or vertically relative to the "camera". That means our limb-based movement animation is just no good. Custom frames are a must.
"Depth" (or z-axis) based movement is really tricky to get right. We want to get the sharks body to visibly bend, but at the same time the silhouette will remain largely unchanged. Not an easy feat!
On the upside the movement itself is pretty straightforward, so I can probably get away with just winging it instead of analyzing references in great detail (or so I hope! You be the judge ;))
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Advanced ADOM Animations
So, you know, ADOM is at least in part an AAA product - the Advanced ADOM Animations part ;)
As you already know, to have a complete set we need to go through about 550 monster sprites to animate. That's a *lot*. We needed a way to get through them (relatively) fast. One of our methods to speed things up is using a single animation set for all monsters with similar anatomy. For example all humanoids share the same basic animation set. That way we still have to prepare 550 sprites, but we don't have to invent 550 individual animations. (The system can be easily extended, so although this is a good starting point it doesn't mean we won't customize the animations further down the line).
We also try to make the animations minimalistic at this stage - so no fancy extra frames, no unnecessary elements, limbs, etc.
This is all well and good, but every once in a while we run into a monster that just doesn't work well within these limitations.
As you already know, to have a complete set we need to go through about 550 monster sprites to animate. That's a *lot*. We needed a way to get through them (relatively) fast. One of our methods to speed things up is using a single animation set for all monsters with similar anatomy. For example all humanoids share the same basic animation set. That way we still have to prepare 550 sprites, but we don't have to invent 550 individual animations. (The system can be easily extended, so although this is a good starting point it doesn't mean we won't customize the animations further down the line).
We also try to make the animations minimalistic at this stage - so no fancy extra frames, no unnecessary elements, limbs, etc.
This is all well and good, but every once in a while we run into a monster that just doesn't work well within these limitations.
We've had some good honest feedback back in February about the early animation attempts. Just a quick recap of the animation gif that post contained:
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