Adding New Animation Frames

[jrconway3]

Thought I could open up a discussion related to this card:
#38

When I started working on sprites again early last year and creating new assets, I also started adding these assets to idle, sit, run, and jump as well. Idle to me is hardly all that relevant; its literally in all the base frames anyway and jump, just with an extra "bump". But the rest require significant additions to add new assets to them.

I also added a few others as a bonus based on LPC Revised, and there's a few I missed--namely at least Push/Pull and Carry. I'll drop sub-discussions in here for each topic.

I opened this discussion to address the possibility of new frames (mostly lift, carry, etc), as well as for feedback on the additions I added.

[jrconway3]

When I came back early last year, Sit, Run, and Jump were already sitting in the bodies section of the repo and just hadn't been added. In addition, I later found out that ElizaWy's LPC Revised also had Climb, which I knew I REALLY wanted as well.

Eventually after discussing with Sanderfrenken I added them into the core repo, and threw in the rest of Eliza's animations as a bonus. These were purposely extend beyond the normal size of the original sheet so that old assets would still fit nicely without causing issues (I confirmed before opening a PR that expanding the sheet wouldn't cause problems).

I set up two different versions; one with LPC Revised Run and one with the original Run by Evert / Ben Creating which was intended to "standardize" it. Bluecarrot16 also mentioned this is a comment left on my release, explaining the logic behind why the new Run animation was designed:
https://opengameart.org/content/expanded-universal-lpc-spritesheet-idle-run-jump-lpc-revised-combat-and-assets#comments

In the end I ultimately went with LPC Revised Run because Eliza had more work done on it in terms of clothing. In addition, Bluecarrot16 said that it was designed to be "easier" to add assets to. Personally speaking, I didn't see that when looking it over, to me both versions looked just as hard to design for, but Eliza's both looked better and had more assets ready, so that's why I went with it.

When adding these frames, naturally we would be missing the "Male" body model, or a hypothetical "Masculine, Thick" that did not exist yet on Eliza's versions. As such, I created my own version of this run animation for the "Male" body model. I also did the same with Climb and Emotes. I considered how to handle Combat, but ultimately didn't create a new model there (at least not yet). Instead its just using the same animation as "Masculine, Thin" aka "Teen".

[jrconway3]

The major addition I wanted to include, but didn't see it anywhere at the time I added them, was Push/Pull and Carry. Thanks to shadowfinderstudios who left a comment in the above issue, I was able to find these again by Evert:
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-animations-push-and-carry

Originally I thought about trying to draw new versions of them, but bluecarrot16 didn't think it was a good idea and instead we should reuse existing frames as much as possible.

If there's any other frames that people might be interested in to add, we can discuss that here as well. I think the biggest core one is probably push/pull and carry. One possibility I considered for pull is trying to do it using the third "emote" frame, with the pulling lurching back. That might be a good position for the body while still reducing the number of frame variations. The only issue is I don't know how it'll look with the legs.

Another problem is Evert's assets are listed under "CC-BY-SA" rather than OGA-BY. Evert said he was willing to support OGA-BY at the time, but technically speaking, I don't know if that qualifies as enabling OGA-BY if the parent creators allow it (Redshrike added support for OGA-BY to all of his assets).

However, we'd still need to do a new "push" / "pull" anyway. Daneeklu never added support for OGA-BY and I don't like the idea of mixing licenses on the same frame. So we'd probably want to draw arms, or grab an arms frame from a different pose somewhere.

In addition, "carry" would be awkward without a new "lift" animation. that said, this shouldn't be too hard; its just a standing pose with the hands moving from "push / pull" to "lift". So we'd need 1-2 frames of the arms moving up. We probably wouldn't even need a second pair of frames here.

[jrconway3]

When I brought up adding new animation frames with The Foreman (a new contributor to OGA who added fairy wings), he really wanted diagonals. The only diagonals I have seen are run and walk, which might be fine. I thought maybe we could discuss those, but bluecarrot16 was pretty adamant that diagonals just weren't a good idea at all, and he's probably right. I'm not even sure how we could add them in.

Still, I'll leave this comment here if anyone has any further insights. This is something I doubt happens, but it doesn't hurt to discuss.

[Gaurav0]

RPG Maker MZ provides the following side view battle animations, if anyone cares:

[jrconway3]

That's a lot more than I thought. There's a handful of things we could recreate with the existing animations, though.

I know ElizaWy said she still wanted to work on more battle animations. I considered the possibility of adding those once she gets around to them. I think she also said she wanted to make 4-direction "down" animations (based on the current "down" animation). Adding it in now will be kinda difficult with the structure we have, though.

If we did have 4-directional "down" animation as well, that could also give us a "crisis" animation, too, because the "kneeling" pose would work great for that.

"Taking damage" is one I hadn't really considered before, but it is pretty common. However, I think someone did make one over here I considered adding later:
ElizaWy/LPC#10

"Guard" I think could easily be created from the existing battle animations by Eliza.

[jrconway3]

That being said, perhaps there's a way to still use LPC sprites here and reduce the number of animation options without too much hassle. Its certainly worth considering. As much as I'd love to fill out tons and tons of animations its a lot of work. :P

Bluecarrot16's suggestion, though, was not changing the body model up too much when adding variations. In theory that could give us more flexible options, add more types of animations (like guard or evade) while still making it relatively easy to add new assets.

I'm somewhat surprised there's no "stab" animation. We have a Lance "thrust" animation, but nothing like a rapier or dagger stab.

[EtagiBI]

Are there any plans to add kick and punch animations?

[jrconway3]

They don't exist, someone would have to make them. Then assets would have to be made for them. This is mostly talking about base animations that already exist and aren't on the ULPC.

I have no plans to make new base animations myself, other than maybe fitting existing base models onto the existing animations. I think ElizaWy planned to make more, and if she does make any I'll look into adding them, but by no means will I be going through all this effort again to add assets to every single frame, I'm primarily focusing on assets and animations I want.

That said, some of the slash animations could reasonably be modified to implement a "punch" style animation. Kick would probably require something completely new.