[Bontz-team] character animation - ork

[Owen Swerkstrom]

I just finished giving our first character full range
of motion.  It's not a character you expect, it's a
new one, the hidden playable character Ork.

(backstory: Ork's been a little cartoon guy of mine
since I was about 8.  As you might imagine he's not
terribly complex-looking nor terribly imaginative. 
But I've wanted there to be a game involving this
little critter forever so nyeh.)

Within Bontz, Ork is one of the things that inhabits
the planet after Mucka gets hooked on pot and screws
up evolution.  If the player does the right stuff
before going back to take Mucka out of the gene pool,
they'll meet this alternate-future ... thing, and be
able to take him with.

The range of motions is maybe too complete.  I'm
rendering right now, and for each of the 8 directions
there are 230 frames of animation.  A fair number of
those are duplicates, and some will only be relevant
in certain directions (climbing only happens when
facing north, etc) and some frames can be dropped
altogether and still keep the motion smooth, but we're
still probably talking about 100 frames per direction,
at 128x128 and about 5k each, so I don't know what
sort of havoc this kind of thing is going to wreak
with your image loading plans.  3 of these guys and
some lesser-animated enemies and/or NPCs on-screen
adds up to lots of memory.  Back when this type of
game was popular, everything was stored in
easily-addressable ROM so they didn't have these
problems.  If worse comes to worst, we can take out
the diagonals and just use the east and west
animations while still moving them diagonally.  That's
half of the memory right there, if you figure we can't
afford it.

But that stuff's your problem for now, and I have
another proposal ('cause this message just isn't long
enough dammit!)
as I've been rendering, I've put sprites in ork/s,
ork/sw, ork/w and so on.  the contents of each dir are
the same, just facing different directions.  So I'm
thinking one master info file could say that running
goes:
ork0070.png
ork0071.png
ork0072.png
ork0073.png
ork0074.png
loop{
ork0075.png
ork0076.png
ork0077.png
ork0078.png
ork0079.png
ork0080.png
ork0081.png
ork0082.png
ork0083.png
ork0084.png
}
ork0087.png
ork0088.png
ork0089.png
ork0090.png
and depending on the direction the engine would know
which directory to grab those files from.
Sensible?  Stupid?
Also you mentioned animation branching, I don't know
what sort of syntax you'd like for that but you get
the drift of what I was laying out above.  From a
standing position, there's a "start running"
animation, a "running loop", and a "stop running" that
winds up back at standing.

all right, message too long, I know.  Anyway I'll
throw Ork into CVS when he's done rendering.

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