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How much work is the sprite animation thing?


Nuttss

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I literally have no idea... how much work is it to build these troopers and animate them?

I've seen several threads that go 'yea, that would be neat but that would double or quintuple the sprits...'

How many man hours per spite or % of total project is this work?

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It's this much work:

Q. Will there be female soldiers in the game?

A. No, I’m afraid not. This is not because of deep-seated prejudices amongst women, but because we’re using sprites. We already have to render every armour type with every weapon from 8 different directions, which is in the region of 100,000 frames of animation. If we had female soldiers, we’d have to double that. There will however be female civilians.

This is the same reason why all the soldiers on the battlefield are white – there are ethnic soldiers in the art, but adding non-white soldiers would also double the number of animation frames required.

FAQ: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forum/

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I read that... and it was one of the items that lead to the question.

Forgive my ignorance but double an unknown quantity is still an unknown quantity. Is it something like 'we have on animator and he/she spent the last 8 months on the current animation and isn't done' ?

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It's hundreds of thousands of frames, every single combination of armour/weapon/gender/skin colour needs to be processed separately for each of the 8 different facings. I can't tell you the exact numbers (I wouldn't be surprised if Chris himself couldn't) but it doesn't take much to realize it's an insane amount of tedious work just to produce a bit of visual variance. The amount of time and effort invested is vastly disproportionate to the effect achieved.

Asking for an exact percentage in relation to the entire development process up to release is a bit silly. Non-inclusion of female soldiers wasn't a decision that was reached at random with no good reason.

Just so it's clear female civilians are included because they have no different visual variance (no weapons, armour, etc.) so only 8 frames (one for each facing) are required for each civilian as opposed to hundreds and thousands that your soldiers need.

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Asking for an exact percentage in relation to the entire development process up to release is a bit silly. Non-inclusion of female soldiers wasn't a decision that was reached at random with no good reason.

.

If you don't know then it's o.k. to ignore it or say you don't know.

Haven't you ever kicked back and wondered.. "how does that work"?

What is silly is judging a casual question.

For others who are not Jean.. and possibly actually have had experince in this type or work... can you ballpark how much this animation is? Again, this is supposed to be a causual forum and is not a complaint or effort to change decisions made.

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It's one of the two most time consuming and labour intensive processes in the entire game. Stupidly so.

There's either going to be 6 or 7 different Xenonaut armour types in the game, and let's say 25 weapons (for arguments' sake). That alone means 7*25*8 = 1,400 animation sets. There's currently 13 different animations in each set, = 18,200 animation spritesheets. Each one is 5-50 frames long. You're talking somewhere between half a million to a million frames of rendering to get that done, just for the Xenonaut units. There's probably similar numbers for the aliens, plus the civilians etc all have to be done too. Oh, and the vehicles.

Plus every single frame is rendered out at 840x840 and then shrunk down and automatically post-processed in Photoshop, which takes about a second per frame. It's not a quick or easy process, especially given we've just had to restart all the rendering because we had to change the cover system...

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If you're going to be rude to me for trying to answer your question at least approach it rationally with a valid cause.

If you don't know then it's o.k. to ignore it or say you don't know.

But I did tell you, didn't I? I pointed you to the faq info and tried to explain the quantitative factors involved. Even without the exact figures enough info is available for one to realize the scope of the work.

Haven't you ever kicked back and wondered.. "how does that work"?

That's not what you were asking. You were asking how *much* work it is, not how it works.

What is silly is judging a casual question.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the question. As you see Chris' answer still doesn't answer your percentage question. It simply adds numbers to,

It's one of the two most time consuming and labour intensive processes in the entire game. Stupidly so.

,what I've already told you.

You're welcome.

Edited by Jean-Luc
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I work in a game studio as well, from what I know certain chain of animation takes about 2 to 3 weeks to have 1 type of animation. Something as simple as have a villager walk from left to right is about that much time and about 3 or 4 people working on it.

Generally you will have an animator drawing all the frames, and this depends what they are doing and how often, 24 frames or 30 frames a sec. if the animate loops (for walking) you could loop it in about 3 secs or something like that so that is about 72 to 90 frames (if it loops in 3 secs). then you got a team to color in all those frames... that is ALOT of work.

Our art team here is really amazing some of our animations are ridiculous so it might be an over estimation.

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yeah 3D animation is way cheaper now a days than 2D.

You can do fancy things like change the clothes of the 3D model yet have all the animation function the same (AKA TF2 hats). When you try to add, lets say a hat to your 2D character your probably gonna have your artists draw another 72 to 90 frames of just the hats.

Its the same logic to why we dont have old school Disney 2D cartoons and all this 3D CG movies.

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So deliberately choosing this approach to make it look retro is making it more time consuming than a 3D approach (to certain degree)? Wow I bet most of the people don't realise this, so I'm even more grateful for the retro looks now !

I'm not sure how "deliberate" it was but we're stuck with the choice now. :P Still, I'm glad of it. Like with most modern technology the idea is to make things faster and easier. Just look at movies. "Sets" are so retro, everything is done before a blue screen nowadays (yes, technically that's a set to, you know what I mean :P).

Here, compare BG2 and NWN2.

Game menu:

baldur__s_gate_2_main_menu_by_stamatimenos-d356o9q.jpg

202108-neverwinter-nights-2-windows-screenshot-main-menus.jpg

Inventory screen:

10542-baldur-s-gate-ii-shadows-of-amn-windows-screenshot-a-typical.jpg

6-lpnwn2_ch037_005.jpg

People just don't bother nearly as much anymore yet the cost of game development has skyrocketed.

Edited by Jean-Luc
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Well all the animations etc ARE done in 3D - that's why they have to be rendered. It's just then that we shrink them down and add an outline in PS to make them look more hand-painted. So we've got a sort of horrible halfway house between the two.

Unfortunately the engine doesn't support 3D so we're stuck with it.

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It's one of the two most time consuming and labour intensive processes in the entire game. Stupidly so.

Plus every single frame is rendered out at 840x840 and then shrunk down and automatically post-processed in Photoshop, which takes about a second per frame.

Thanks Chris, that really puts some context around how much work is involved in this 2D look.

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  • 9 months later...
I'm sure some modder could jurry rig up something to do some automated pallet swapping on the skin tones.

that could be done in game, if the original sprites were keyed to have sections of their palettes be adjustable, which was common in some pre-3D RTS games to assign team colors. however, much like the paper doll sprites I suggested, i don't think that kind of thing can be added after the fact, it has to be a planned part of the design from day 1.

Maybe if they do a sequel or another Turn based Tactics/Strategy game that uses sprites, they could implement one or both ideas, but I suspect it's too late to change that here.

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  • 7 months later...

Is there an easy way to just do color swaps like the old 2d D&D games like Baldur's Gate? I'd just really like to be able to have soldiers not only be white.

NVM, between writing this and hitting reply a moderator answered this question...

Edited by OthelloNYC
Question answered above
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That reply is a year old, how long did it take you to type your question? ;)

Even if you did manually go through and alter your soldiers to have different skin colours there would be no way for the game to decide which to use as far as I can see.

The game uses a Basic armour sprite for every person using basic armour, the skin colour is just part of that armour sprite.

Actually not quite true.

You could create different armour types like Basic Armour African, Basic Armour Oriental and so on then manually equip the correct version.

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Hey Guys!

The game is great IMHO and the 2D graphics are also great being a 40+ yr old gamer. It sounds however like the approach taken to develop the game however has added TONS of work with rendered 3D models to 2D then hand painting. So, My hats off to you guys for all your efforts in the art work and over coming most of the technical problems that came up with that.

Happy Gaming!

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