I was thinking for the animations have a standing state, where the character is standing, in battle stance, moving as they breath. The loop of this animation will loop, say when there chest gets to the highest point in the motion.

For all other motions, say lunge with sword and swing we start that animation from the loop of the standing state animation. So when you click attack, it might be 3sec before you actualy see yourself do that attack. Either that, or we could just make the standing state animation go faster for the rest of that.

When the move is done, the character returns back to there previous position (loop of the standing state) and continues in that loop.

Hopefully this wont cause any jumpy animations.

I need ideas for the getting attacked animation.
They would fall back, or move down or something, but to get it streamline could be hard. Maybe start that animation for mid way of the loop so it wont look so jumpy no matter where it all is.

What ya's think?

Can't we just go straight to the attack animation from the standing animation? I'm pretty sure that's what most games do.

To start things off, we'll probably just have 2 people standing facing eachother with probably no (or basic) animations and add the animations as we go. Same with weapons and equipments, there'd be no real graphic for these right away, probably just a default weapon/item to represent them all to begin with. This stuff will take a while to do and I wouldn't necessarily want the entire project to be put on delay because of the graphics/animations.

How far along are you with coding?



The bodies will have 5 sections, head, mid-body, held weapon, feet and held shield. Each of those will be a movie clip filled with multiple movie clips on multiple frames, each movie clip containing something different. So for like head movie clip, if the person owns the veneeval mask, for example, than it'd be on frame 8 (for example).

This will work out quite well for everything except the weapon type because the player would be standing different depending on weapon. Basically there's 5 weapon types that require different stances:
Sword, Knife, axe, whip, etc - these items held with 1 hand with item at vertical position
Pistols - items held with 1 hand but pointing at enemy
Rifle - items held with both hands...held like how people hold these
Cannon - any item that you dont hold but must operate
Sling Shot, bow & arrow, etc - items that require 1 hand to hold and another to operate

Also, since players can't necessarily select an item that chooses there type of pants and face (and maybe skin and hair color), to start off with we could make these just a default blue pants, brown hair and white skin and later make it so users can choose these things for their battle character.

It might be a hassle to make a character creator; where you can choose eye color, hair color, height, basically the X:length Y:width Z:height of your torso and legs and such. It would probably take forever, but it would be do-able with some sort of program. Much easier in the long run is what i'm thinking. I'll check for such a program. *checks* Can't find a program, but I see in some EASports games that they have such a create a character mode, so to speak. I'll contnue my search and keep you "posted."

If we had a create a character thing, it would just run with say, 5 differnt type of eyes, they each have a preset location on the face. So changing eyes, will change the image and the x/y coords of the image.

You wouldn't be able to change the x/y coordinates and there'd probably only be 1 body type (possibly 2 or 3).

You change the x/y from within the actual eye clip. This is how they do it on ever quest.
Have a bunch of images, and say, position where you want the sword to be held is at is actualy 0,0 in its own clip. This way you can make double sided blades, long blades, guns, ect. Similar idea works for body parts, and could possibly be applied to custom faces.