WILL's Prototype Designs

[WILL]

I like it!

Giving it some thought... I want the muscles on the original 'incomplete' first model. Reason: I hate the crappy metalic '$1.99 robot' looking arms and legs that much.

Besides we can come up with more enhanced muscles for him later on. It just won't be as visual, unless we come up with a super heavy lifting model. Sometimes it's not the looks of something than the materials used inside. It'll just be one of those non-visual upgrades...

But the 10 frames is alright, it'll give us some smooth animation. If you send them to me in a zipped bmp file (ala. the game engines's format) be sure to make them 24bit(MS Paint compatable) and the transparent color will be cyan(R=0 B=255 G=255). All frames will be in one horizontal row. Faster to draw from memory.

Start with Standing animation, wait state(after a while or something random after standing for a while), running, jumpping, falling, climbing then taking damage, and finally dying. [size=9px](I have my concerns about this... can you make him die 'nicely' within a 48x64 frame?)[/size].

Either way... I like it do it up!

[Robert Kosek]

can you make him die 'nicely' within a 48x64 frame?

Electrical overload and explode? That'd look pretty cool...

Lookin' really good!

[WILL]

Exploding would be perhaps impressive, but I'm not sure if it'll be practical. Then again, how will the robot be powered?

I think an explosion would only be practical if the power core he uses is of some kind of really unstable material.

Mind you nowadays we can power our watches and calculators for years without the need to change a battery. Cell phones now for days instead of hours. Laptop batteries and the like can only go on for a few hours, but how knows in a couple hundreds of years?

I'm going to assume that it can be done in the future and that he will not explode. Instead short circuiting and falling down will be the prefered method of robo-death!

I realize I just complicated the animaiton process there, but it's worth it...


Which does bring a new idea for an upgrade. His power core. A mission could be to get an updated power core because yours is about to run out...? Or your on your backup with only hours left till you loose power and die. It could be a timed mission too!

[cairnswm]

Reiner Prokien also uses bitmaps for his images. His sprites typically use a 96x96 frame, but sometimes his bying animations need more space and he then uses a 128x128 frame.

The size of the frame should not matter very much as programatically you can check for collisions on a smaller area of the frame.

[K4Z]

...



Without the muscles he doesn't look that bad. Lol, Sly is right, with the muscels he does look like a dude in a suit. But hopefully no one will really notice too much while they're running a jumping through the actual game.

Either way, WILL has the final say, but I think the muscles should be a seperate visual upgrade (Mabye really early in the game ).

I've got some ideas on how to create a nice dying animation within the frame, however, a larger frame would be much nicer . And I don't think a larger frame would have any effect on performance, esp. using OpenGL.

[WILL]

Geez... I should be in bed. :?

But anyhow... The muscles will stay. This thing has to look partly human either way. It's the whole point of it's invetion, to be intelligent, be more... human-like. Besides, there are features that really do make him look robotic. Besides his hands detach! Thats a pretty mechanical feature, no?

And who says that we won't be having cutscenes and story interludes? [size=9px](I can hear KAZ hitting the floor as he is fainting :lol[/size] Upgrading animations, etc will show him very much as a robot.

So you think you can have a basic set of at least standing, running, jumpping and falling before tomorrow night? It'll allow me to have something to use while I'm at sea to perfect my engine. [size=9px](The actual configuration of the robot would be handy too, remove the ears, jet boosters and hands)[/size]

Also... for dying. I was thinking, what if I doubled the width of the frame? So I can keep it all in the same virtual screen.You'd have your other frames, then your dying animation that was simply double the width to be drawn.

So then Standard 48x64 and 96x64 for death frames. It'd only be a simple matter of changing the value of the TGameObject.Draw's SrcRect variable I use to draw the character's frame.


If you can pull it off, awesome. If not, thats fine. I'll find a way to compensate otherwise. But it seems we are sticking with the rendered look? I kinda like that idea. And since you are modeling first and would have to pixel second, it would save an annoying step.

Well tomorrow is my last kick at the can before I leave for my trip. See you then.

OH! One last small note. I realized the other day when I took one of your renderings of the robot and used it in the engine that I had to use a Y offset for the sprite so that the 'overlapping feet' could be lined up properly. Can you ensure that they are also lined up for each frame as if they will be drawn with the same YOffset AND consider that the very center of the frame will be the center of the game object (so the left half and the right half from the center of the frame's image will be equal in size for collision). It's all based off the middle of the frame. The X,Y of the character is located at the bottom center of the robot's feet. I hope that makes sense...

[K4Z]

*Picks myself up off the floor*

Well actually, I already had the idea of cutscenes. I've been thinking a bit about the opening scene, with the robot awakening in a swampy area, or however to story starts.

Heh heh, I'll do my best to get a simple sprite sheet done in time, but no promises .

The renderings before were just a test, so I'll make sure the robot is center and the feet line up.

Well, happy coding!

[WILL]

I will cross my fingers for you.

[Sly]

K4Z, have you done any more on the little robot fella? It has been very cool to see his development.

[K4Z]

I haven't had much free time to get any work done on the robot :cry: .

Though, I did manage to get a simple sprite sheet to WILL just before he left :lol: , of a standing and running animation. I Ran out of time to finish a jumping animation.
I had restarted the run animation from scratch, more fluent and aligned:
(He's stripped of his upgrades as how he will look at the start of the game)


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I've also started a small scene of the robot waking up in a small cave/swampy area, that might be used in the opening cutscene. But...I'm keeping it all under raps at the moment .