Is there a way to extend animation?

Looking over the demo game that came with the program, I noticed that the walkaround sprites are two-step animation, rather than three-step. (Two-step = the sprite walking with two frames, whereas three-step has the sprite walking with four, left foot, neutral, right foot, neutral.)

I personally prefer three-step sprites, and generally design them to fit this style. Though, personally, I'd just have a bunch of animations that make the sprite look fluid. Maybe five separate sprites that make up one full animation.

If I have to input a script to do this, then so be it, if there is a way built into the program, then I would appreciate directions on how to do this.

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May the Moon light your path, and the Shadows hide you from your prey.

Posgagen urzefa Posyosriig ahgesqizeur genyouldr Jiikyouldr, gariigig urzefa Sazegaigyouldsa zegesigfe genyould fr'yopos genyouldr jiikrfagen.

Sadly, animation is a big weakness of the OHRRPGCE.

There is not yet any built-in feature for three (or more) frame walking.

Yes, you can indeed script it. I believe there was a relatively recent example script for doing it somewhere, but I can't find it on the wiki now.

So is that a maybe towards it being a built in feature eventually?

Everything will be a built in feature eventually.

This is the recent talk about multiframe animation since I was the one asking:

http://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5995

It's not exactly a thread about 3 frame but it should help.

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I saw that. From what I gathered, it wouldn't be what I'm looking for.

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May the Moon light your path, and the Shadows hide you from your prey.

Posgagen urzefa Posyosriig ahgesqizeur genyouldr Jiikyouldr, gariigig urzefa Sazegaigyouldsa zegesigfe genyould fr'yopos genyouldr jiikrfagen.

Graphics and animation in particular is the biggest weakness of the engine (and is therefore the highest priority... unfortunately there's nothing in the next release, but I strongly feel we should make it the focus of the one after that.)

There's an old three-frame walking script by it's about 13 years old now and very obsolete. So it's time to write a new one (I've been waiting for someone to ask).

But... I didn't get much further than finding a 3 frame walkabout set online and importing it before I got distracted by all the pink in the tileset I tried to import and fixing that rough corner in the engine instead. Now it's bedtime.

I finished the script and a demo of it. Feenicks kindly donated three-frame walking sprites, and BMR offered to improve the demo. Later someone can upload a copy to SS.

http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Scripts:Three-frame_walking

Awesome!

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Hopefully that becomes an awesome and stable script.

On a semi-related note, is it possible to create an animated title? Such as, an image appearing from darkness and letters falling from above to settle in the center of the screen. Or, would that be something too complicated and time consuming to do properly?

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May the Moon light your path, and the Shadows hide you from your prey.

Posgagen urzefa Posyosriig ahgesqizeur genyouldr Jiikyouldr, gariigig urzefa Sazegaigyouldsa zegesigfe genyould fr'yopos genyouldr jiikrfagen.

This could be done with plotscripting.

The image appearing from darkness could be done with the fading commands or palette manipulation commands. Making the letters fall from above could be done with slices.

I think for someone with a lot of scripting experience it would be a fairly easy script, but for a new scripter without much experience it would be a rather challenging (but still doable) crash-course.

Alternatively, I would do something like this by drawing each part of the animation frame by frame in another program (photoshop, gimp... etc). Then I would import the frames as background screens and create a very short script which rapidly cycles through the frames from start to finish waiting about 1-3 ticks between each frame. This would obviously be more time consuming on the design end of the animation but quite simple to script. If your more comfortable in art than in code then this could be a good option too.

Also if you are familiar with the animation tools in photoshop, you could create a much much much more elaborate animation than the one described by pre-animating your background screen frames within the photoshop interface. Doing this would allow you to animate many separate elements independently and experiment with timing. The option to use onion skins would also be useful as it would allow you to make the elements look like their accelerating, decelerating, warping, etc...

EDIT: Here's a little video I found showing how to animate pixel related things in photoshop. Once you get a nice animation complete, it's as easy as importing the graphics in to the editor frame by frame and then making a script to cycle through them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWgsAm2UYo


Speaking of animated title screens, I really want to make mine like the title screen off of Yoshi's Island! Not only will this be very difficult and require a hard weeks worth in photoshop, but it will also require me to have planned out all the key areas and geography of my island.

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@Bob: Okay, that sounds much more simpler than what was running through my head. (Though, given the fact that there's scripting, that means a lot of learning for me.)

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May the Moon light your path, and the Shadows hide you from your prey.

Posgagen urzefa Posyosriig ahgesqizeur genyouldr Jiikyouldr, gariigig urzefa Sazegaigyouldsa zegesigfe genyould fr'yopos genyouldr jiikrfagen.

There is a way to make maptiles animate for more than the allowed frames. In my Zelda game concept What makes a Zelda Game? or called something along those lines. At the end of each level the player collects a rotating Triforce piece, it rotates in more than the allows amount of animation frame and looks rather slick in game. Here's how it can be done:

You will need to use tilemap animations for this, so you will need your set of animated tiles to be near each other. When creating the actual animation, at the last frame of the first animation sequence, make sure it's a blank tile, and set it's wait to be the time that the second animation takes to elapse.

In the second animation sequence, make the first frame a blank tile, and wait for the elapsed time of the first animation. Then make the rest of the frames there normally. Then when placing the tiles onto the map, place both at different layers and enable their animations. It will appear as if it is only continuous animation sequence, while it's in reality, two separate animations combined into one.