Sprites are way too "detailed"

[Mooton]

For awhile I was playing Xenonauts and something was bothering me about the sprites. I eventually realized it was their lack of decisiveness. Everything is so needlessly drawn out. Taking out 2/3 of the frames for basically every animation and speeding the animation up to run at the same framerate would make the game far easier for modders wanting to make custom sprites and also make it feel so much better.

Seriously when I tell my guy to shoot I don't want to sit there waiting two seconds for him to do it. I want it to happen. Like right now. Or crouching/standing up taking twelve eternities. Or movement. You know X-Com had adjustable movement speeds from really slow to instant, I don't think I see this in Xenonauts. Seems like something that would be really nice to have.

[Skitso]

I kinda agree, atleast in certain animations. Crouching, jumping over fence etc. animations could be more explosive.. fewer frames displayed faster could actually do the trick.

[Chris]

It's very little to do with the number of frames (modders wouldn't be able to edit them even if we reduced the number by 2/3), and reducing the number of frames by 2/3 would probably leave it looking jerky.

However all the animations have a customisable framerate controlled by the "frametime" property in their spectre. The crouch animations are all set to 50, which is why they display quite slowly - but it's easy enough to use regular expressions to search and replace them all down to 30, which speeds it up by 40%. I'll have a look at some of the animations shortly and see if any look obviously out of time.

[Assoonasitis]

I almost recommend setting the movement animations for the Predator slower, but that'd look weird on account of they'd still look like they were running.

[Commissar Pancakes]

While we're on the topic of animations, it seems the MachineGun firing animation is horribly out of time with the actual bullet effects.

I keep seeing him spray (with the audio cue) with the bullets flying out of the gun 2-3 seconds later.

[Chris]

Well, the weapon delay on all the alien weapons are set to 1 sec and the longest Xenonaut weapon delay is set to 1.2 sec, so I think people are exaggerating a bit here. We're talking fractions of a second at most.

However, I reviewed the animations earlier and I do think the fire animations could be sped up by 20-30%. They can be a bit plodding occasionally.

Assoonastis - the Androns and Predator are meant to walk more slowly than the other units, and thus have a slower walk animation, but we've not put the code in to allow individual units to move at non-standard speeds yet.

[Skitso]

Yeah, the LMG shooting is completely out of sync. That I think is the most obvious and jarring thing considring animatons

[screeg]

They're right about the firing animations being off, way off in some cases, as in entire animation of machinegunner firing happens and is finished before bullets/sound effects. With him it's not a matter of the animation playing slowly, but starting too early. I have a background in character animation and fractions-of-a-second delays can still look terrible.

Forcing players to watch drawn out animations is a pet peeve of mine too, but in Xenonauts the avatars are so well done it doesn't bother me. I don't think they're overly long.