Advanced Animation Tutorial

This is a very draft'ish page. Please do not link to it from anywhere just yet.

How to write animations

This page deals with how to write the animation WML when you got the frames drawn and ready as well as general guidelines for animation lengths and timing. Proper timing is in many cases almost as important in getting an animation to look nice and smooth than the actual frames are. Information on this page is most useful when you got a small number of frames for the animation but still want it to look as good as possible in-game.

Filler frames

The most common use of this is when you only got one frame to represent an attack. Usually, a single attack frame sliding back and forth (if it's a melee attack) looks pretty bad. Ideally, you'd want to have an animation that has the unit stepping forwards and backwards while swinging his weapon, but now we'll assume that for some reason you have to do with just one drawn frame.

Instead of using the common method, which looks like this:

[animation]
    [frame]
        begin=-100
        end=100
        image=unit-attack.png
    [/frame]
[/animation]

...you can with little trouble make that attack smoother, by having the attack frame kick in only at about halfway into the attack and also having it last only slightly past the point where it actually hits the enemy. How do you do this, if you only got one frame to work with? Well, the easiest solution - and one that works fine with almost any kind of unit - is to use the base frame:

[animation]
    [frame]
        begin=-200
        end=-150
        image=unit.png
    [/frame]
    [frame]
        begin=-150
        end=100
        image=unit-attack.png
    [/frame]
    [frame]
        begin=100
        end=200
        image=unit.png
    [/frame]
[/animation]