Small animations to make the game feel more alive

[Raphi]

This idea might take a while to implement, but I think it would make the world of Andors Trail a lot more alive in some way. You know how there is the butcher in eastern Brimhaven? It is only two alternating images but it looks so fitting! I would love to see such little animations way more often, not only for NPCs but also for map tiles mabye, like some falling leaves from a tree, a wiggly bush or smoke coming out of a chimney.

Wouldn't this be possible by adding a new layer to the maps called "animated" or something, where you could place these special tiles? I don't know how hard it is to make map tiles animated but since there is already this animated NPC I guess it should be possible. And in terms of game performance, this shouldn't be an issue as long as these tiles are used sporadically and are only like 2 fps.

I have trown together a quick smoke animation here to show what I mean:

anim_smoke.png

anim_smoke.gif

What do you all think about that?

[tactical371]

if this came to be, would there be a way to toggle the animations on or off, allowing people to choose whether or not to use them? It may or may not be annoying to them. The smoke animation you have there looks good on its own. But considering that there is a lot of water in the game, and none of it is animated, it might look strange if that smoke is next to a static river, for example. But idk. Might just be nice to have a toggle so that people who like it can see it and people who do not like it cannot.

[Nut]

The chopping butcher or the skeleton band are rather unique and a bit of work, that we won't do everywhere e.g. for water or smoke.
Also the performance of the used technic is really bad.

If we would do that, we would have to change the engine for it, e.g. have 2 or more tiles that are displayed one after another in a given time.
Before doing that we would change the walking animation of hero and NPCs.

But all that would be much work that noone of the dev team wants to do yet.
So we wouldn't deny such animations, but I don't see that in the near future.

[tactical371]

If Raphi wants to become a dev and do it himself, would the work be merged into the main branch of the git repository for the game?

[Nut]

I'd say so, if it is compatible to the existing work.
We wouldn't want e.g. to rework all hundreds of maps.

[Antison]

I would rather see sunset and sunrise before trees swaying in the wind or chimney smoke. But that's just me.

[acridpot]

I would rather see sunset and sunrise before trees swaying in the wind or chimney smoke. But that's just me.

I know absolutely nothing about coding... So just help me here.

Is it possible to change the way the existing game looks...?

Like its 2D but better textures... Or even 3D?

Or would you have to totally rework the game for that?

[Antison]

We are never going to go with 3D. That is not what AT is all about.

[Raphi]

Technically it should be possible if you'd redo all textures, you might not really get a 3D effect going but something like a high-res texturepack might be doable with minor code changes. Would be a heck lot of work though.

[acridpot]

Technically it should be possible if you'd redo all textures, you might not really get a 3D effect going but something like a high-res texturepack might be doable with minor code changes. Would be a heck lot of work though.

Ah, cuz I was wondering if AT could become something like "Evoland"