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  • Best way to do character with 4 movement directions

    anglais
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I'm planning on making games that will have a "top-front" type of view (similar to the one from Nimble Quest) in the future.

What would be the best approach to doing animation for characters in such view? Left/right is simple - I just flip the character. How about walking top/down - a different versions of each animation for such movements? (so I would have to have "walk-leftright", "walk-up", "walk-down", "fight-leftright", "fight-up" and "fight-down") Or maybe there is a simpler version (skins?).

Sounds right to me. I don't think there's a way around that. I don't think you should be trying to cheat your way around animating extra stuff especially if it's basic stuff.

Thanks. I just wanted to make sure before I start, so I won't have to change too much later. 🙂

Good luck! 4-direction is actually pretty okay.
The diagonals in 8-direction stuff are the really challenging ones.

As Pharan has said, don't try and cut corners and planning beforehand will make the process much smoother.

I am working on 8-direction characters, which I basically only have to work with 5 directions

Up
Up Right
Right
Down Right
Down

...and then I can flip the 3 'Right' directions at runtime to go left.

I have each direction as a separate skeleton, and have written a character class in my game which takes care of managing the 8 skeletons and which to display, their position, direction, movement, animation etc which after the initial phase all went pretty smoothly.

As I said plan plan plan, and good luck! 🙂

Hm, separate skeletons? Is that really necessary?

Separate skeletons is easier to work with in the editor and only slightly more complicated in code (but nothing you can't abstract away into a view/avatar class' functionality) but in some ways also much cleaner too.

The disadvantage though is that you can't make fluid transformation from one direction to the other (although left/right flip also doesn't allow it).

With only 4 directions, you wouldn't have fluid transitions either way.

A transition system on top of this skeletal system is a bit more challenging to make but it can be done. But really, even if they were all in one skeleton, it would be just as difficult to make.

You'll have a much bigger problem animating with 3 different skeleton setups in one skeleton.

Magnesus a écrit

The disadvantage though is that you can't make fluid transformation from one direction to the other (although left/right flip also doesn't allow it).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I don;t see any reason why you can't do fluid transformations between directions in an 4 way or 8 way setup, it just takes planning and the correct code to manage it at runtime.

Could you give an example to make sure I am understanding you correctly?

Well, it would be much harder. While simple mixing makes quite a nice effect already (at least in some cases) - I use it in my platformer - when a character is climbing a ladder he looks as if he walks in top direction, I use mix for all animations and you can see for a short while how his arms/hands/legs move into new position (from "walk" animation to "climb" animation) when he starts climbing a ladder. It's of course far from perfect, because swapping textures is obviously not fluid and some movements are awkward but with separate skeletons you would have to make additional animation for the transition.