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, smooth and consistent with the rest of the game than the actual frames are.

Timing

As a general rule, a melee swing should last about 400ms - 200ms before and 200ms after the moment when the swing hits, to keep the speed at which the unit slides back and forth constant. Naturally there can be exceptions to this, like woses, which have much slower attack animations than most. With ranged attacks, the length of the animation isn't quite as important, since the units aren't taking turns in sliding back and forth (as is the case with melee combat), which makes different animation speeds much more visible. With ranged attacks, however, you have an additional animation to consider: the missile itself. Most normal missiles such as arrows, knives and spears should fly for 150ms. Magical missiles, big rocks or other unusual projectiles can fly longer, but 150ms is the unofficial standard for normal missiles.

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]

This makes most melee attack frames look much more natural, since this way it seems more like the attacker is hitting the enemy he's approaching, instead of hitting air where he stands and then sliding towards the enemy and back. The same technique can and should be used whenever you have less than 3 drawn attack frames, whereas animations that have more than that would probably benefit very little from this.

Simple way of getting new drawn frames

Sometimes, the unit has frames made for other animations that can be used as part of the attack animation. Most usually this is a defense, movement or a leadership frame. Quite a few defense frames, for example, are quite suitable as a wind-up to the attack. Here's an example of how this is used in a mainline unit: