FE Asset Repository Discussion Thread

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1516

Update 3: I have added all of the Magical users to the third sheet. I also specially edited this sheet to be much smaller, because magical users are surprisingly uniform. It’s listed as unarmed animations, magic animations, staves, and any applicable physical weapons all in one spot at the end.

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(Click image to expand)

This project had more folders than the Lord section, but less images overall because magi tended to only have staves or magic, sometimes both, and very very rarely 3+ animations. It only took me about 4 hours to complete, and that’s with me dicking around in the middle.

I find it kind of amusing how many folders have a Magic animation and an unarmed animation, one which is literally just the Magic animation but with fewer frames. Seems pointless. We could probably cut those out of the repo to save space! I’ll keep them for posterity’s sake, though. The only unarmed animations that matter are when the default class is holding a staff in their standing pose; an unarmed frame without a staff is nice in those cases.

One thing I haven’t mentioned here are my goals for this little still-assembly-project. Yes, I want to locate the holes in the animation repo, but I never do a big task like this for only one reason. Smart people accomplish several goals at once.

  1. I want to locate the ‘holes’ in the repo.
  2. I want to get a big visual of what’s even available in the first place in the repo for my own purposes.
  3. I want to totally restart and rework this old class promotion chart for FE8CM. I’m planning to work on FE8CM in the near future, but I’ll be toning it down to have fewer classes and higher quality.
  4. Before FE8CM though, I want to make two small-scale romhacking projects called FE7 Enhanced and FE8 Enhanced. These projects will have a variety of small but impactful goals, but the most relevant to this conversation is that I want to add -all- of the character-specific animations from the repo to their respective games. As an example:
Animations

Take note that these are only the magic user animations, not any of the infantry, lords, cavalry, or other such characters.

FE7 Erk:

FE7 Lucius:


FE7 Serra:

FE7 Priscilla:

FE7 Pent:


FE7 Nino (Flier Promo too?)


FE7 Kenneth:

FE7 Limstella:

FE7 Ursula:

FE8 Lute:

FE8 L’Arachel:

My goal with any big project is always to complete or work toward multiple objectives simultaneously. This project will also, hopefully, be useful for other people in putting together promotion sheets of their own, figuring out what classes to use in their projects, and so on. Unlike the old Animation Directory, the Repo is a bit hard to navigate, so having all of the animations (up until y’all spriters start pumping out 500 more and I fall behind due to lack of updates) in the same spot will be invaluable for projects of that type.

…Anyway! The magi are done. I’ll probably tackle cavalry/armors tomorrow!

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1517

I wanted to bring it up but have never found a great point to, but I believe the Flail Knight on Emblem Anims’ page currently has the wrong idle frame, or the entire script is messed up.

I might try finding time to make a male alt for the Supplier (the most pure animation), a non-Merlinus Wagon alt that’ll probably use a Merc model and maaaaaaaaaaaaybe get around to doing Siegmund from Nura’s Great Lord Infantry Ephraim with longer hair. That last one’s a big iffie because that animation is h e l l

If anyone else has ideas of simple edits I’d love to hear stuff that sound quick, I like doing things in my free time

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1518

I plan to write up a document expressing some different holes we can fill. I’ll start with a bunch of simple animations, with the goal of ‘perfecting’ the already great animations that are just missing that tiny extra something, then move on to bigger and bigger holes.

There are also some animations that are basically not very good at all, fixing them would probably be more effort than they’re worth.

There are also animations that are conceptually great, but their timings are quite bad so they look clunky when actually put in motion, so they just need rescripting. A good example is the Battle Sage and other similar Sage animations, including L95’s Ishtar, which looks AWESOME but the timing is just a little bit off, and the cape doesn’t flap properly.

Stuff like that. I’ll go through the whole repo, one by one, to see what’s messed up, then post the results here. Might even make a fancy google spreadsheet!

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1519

Give me your finest sardines and pilchards sir.

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1520

This is pretty awesome! You guys are busting butt to improve the repo! Grandfather Klok appreciates!

…Now I just have to edit all these things onto the images I’ve already made. Sigh.

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1521

time to make a hack and use it to prove sme wrong

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1522

Should we try to add extra variants to the repo, not just male and female versions, but like female hooded mages or hoodless druids for example? Or maybe make a female variant of Flasuban’s improved brigand sprite?

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1523

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple days, had to pause my work on the repo sprite lists.

To answer your question is a bit complicated. After talking to other people on the repo discord server, I’ve come up with what should be a solid plan.

First, we need to establish high-tier, high-quality “baseline animations”. We do this by looking at animations in groups based on their original… their original… archetype? As an example:

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These are all of the Fighter-type animations. What you will notice is that they are actually all basically complete. None of them are missing unarmed animations, nor are any of them really super standout, except for that one near the bottom, the “fighter plus swords” animation.

This animation is literally just the vanilla FEGBA fighter, but Vilkalizer made an additional set of swords for them.

So, what we want to do is treat this animation as the “baseline standard.” We want to ‘uplift’ all of the other fighters to its level (or at least the high-quality ones) by giving them matching sword animations. At the very least, the absolute minimum, we want to do this for the basic female fighter so that if someone does want to use a Fighter with swords, they can do so for the male and female alike.

In this way, all of the Fighters in the repo, or at least the top-tier ones like the FE9 Fighter, will have excellent, complete animations for developers to pick from.

Let’s try another example, because this one is more complex and interesting.

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Here, we have all of the Berserkers. These work as a better example because they are more scattered and with varying quality.

We want to start by choosing a high quality animation with lots of weapon types as the baseline. I will choose the Hawkzerker for a few reasons. The first is because it’s relatively generic. If we were to choose something like the Dozla-zerker, it wouldn’t see much use in fangames because the animation is so very character-specific. Hawkzerker is not only more generic, and thus more broadly applicable, but it’s also a higher-quality animation than the basic Berserker.

Hawkzerker:

Normal Berserker:

Please also note the Yetizerker, which is an updated Normalzerker:

And also note the Derzerker, which is based off the Dozlazerker. I quite like it too!

Anyway, if we look at the Hawkzerker, it has a bunch of animations available, making it a good starting point.

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However, the Hawkzerker does not have a Bow animation, while the ‘Barbarian’ animation does: (Made by Orihara_Saki, it’s literally Hawkeye but without his ponytail)

So we want to give the Hawkzerker this bow animation to even out the weapons.

Then, from there, because we now have a fully realized Berserker with all of the available weapon types formatted, we want to first ensure gender equality. We have a range of female Berserkers we can choose to ‘uplift’ to the newly-improved Hawkzerker’s level, giving them their missing weapon types.

Armored Berserker F, by Skitty and eCut:

Female Hawkzerker, by Pikmin and Maiser6:

The FEGirls Berserker, AKA the ‘Tittyzerker’ with bouncing boobs:

The Skinnyzerker, which is labeled as Female but looks fairly ambiguous, by Maiser6 and Zomaxiee:

Of these, the Skinnyzerker is a bit awkward, decently low quality. The FEGirls berserker is… is fine, I guess. I would recommend either the Armored Berserker F, or the Hawkzerker F.

So, let’s just say the Hawkzerker F. Once we make that choice, we then proceed by giving that animation the same treatment as the normal Hawkzerker. We not only make her a Bow animation, but also a Lance animation, which she lacks but the normal Hawkzerker does not.

And finally, once we have a fully uplifted male and female Hawkzerker, we can then move on to uplifting other high quality berserkers, such as normal Hawkeye, the normal Berserkers, Fargux, Dozla, and so on, and so on…

…

…

This is the process I am advocating. We create strong baseline animations within a class archetype, then we ‘uplift’ other high quality animations to that level.

As of now, Mysterious Dancer is uplifting the Salvaged Mercenary by giving it a Very Big Sword.

And here you can see he took the idea from an existing Mercenary animation that had the same big sword.

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JJ09 also uplifted the Harbinger by giving it the same lance attack as the female Harbinger.

However, I would advise everyone to hold off on making animations just yet. If you rush in now, you’ll likely end up duplicating other people’s work and end up with 2+ of the same animation.

I haven’t yet finished this project, let alone gotten half of it done. Rushing in now will make things confusing. If anyone wants to help, I can DM you a link to the repository discord and add you. But for now, it will be a week or two, probably, before I finish the Big Fucking Sprite Sheets which will serve as bases for the Uplifting Project.

Anyway, there you have it. That’s the general idea. I’ll post more on this in the future… you just have to be a little patient with slow, cranky, Grandfather Klok.

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1524

I understand you might wanna make a base animation for all the others to follow, I was just trying to give you some ideas once that is done, as I do eventually wanna see every sprite have all the same variations to one another, as both male and female, and all extra weapon animations, etc. This does sound like a big project, and it’s gonna take a while to get these things done, but hopefully we can all have a better repo in the future with many more animations for existing sprites.

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1525

I did make a sword derzerker that someone can modify and make better if they want. I would but I’m way too busy now.

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I’d be more than happy to make the Barbarian with a bow into the Hawkzerker model, as the guy who gave it Lances. Since it’s just a basic model change, and not an entirely new animation, I’m confident it shouldn’t be an issue. it’d also solve an issue with my character chart

Slight aside, I still love my Lancezerk, it’s probably the dumbest concept I’ve ever created but it’s just so sweet.

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1527

Ive actually started the bow hawkzerker. May take me a couple more days, but it will be done soon.

But as Klok said, I won’t be doing anymore after this one. We should wait until he make sometime of doc showing what needs to be done.

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1528

In my opinion, if people are going to be taking the time to add new Berserker animations, the baseline should be from the Yetizerker. The normal berserker animation is so terrible due to its lack of transition frames. I’m pretty sure the attack is actually just two frames long? Why should we ever treat that as a proper baseline to build everything else off of when we have a much better and smoother animation available? I know it would be a lot of work to update existing animations based off the normal berserker to have that level of smoothness, but what you’re already asking people to do is a lot of work to begin with, so we may as well go the extra mile and update them to look better too. Not everyone is going to want to use Hawkzerker.

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Your Lancezerker is badass.

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1530

Yeah? That’s… pretty much what I said. Even then, Hawkzerker > Yetizerker. They’re fundamentally different animations, IMO, but Hawkzerker is just so much smoother and much more interesting to look at.

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1531

Let people make what they want to make.

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1532

(as long as it follows the site’s rules)

1533

Yes. Nothing inappropriate, obviously. But placing limits or discouraging people from making or submitting animations because they don’t use the preferred “baseline” is silly and needlessly limiting.

We should be fostering a community where people can be creative and submit what they’d like without having to worry if they’re using what a few people label as “preferred”. I like the OG berserker because it is very vanilla GBA and has that choppiness I find charming. It may not be “Better” but stylistically there are multiple approaches that you can take.

We should be grateful anyone wants to take time to make any F2U animations for the community. I am grateful to all creators regardless of what they use or the quality. It’s amazing we have this and we shouldn’t over engineer the process.

If people want to focus on specific projects, then sure, that sounds like a nice initiative, but limits are not a good idea, and stack ranking peoples’ animations to determine what is “preferred” will not create good feelings or foster the environment we should be.

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1534

alternatively, if you do want to make some sort of animation project, anyone is welcome to make a thread for that separate from this one

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And in my case, I disagree because I like the huge overhead slam that the vanilla berserker has and then is cleaned up with the Yetizerker, as compared to the Hawkzerker. Hawk is not bad or anything, but it feels a bit too reserved and controlled for a “berserker” compared to just slamming an axe.

I think Pandan has a point though. It’s very hard to say who should be deciding what sprites are the baseline, or if we should be declaring a baseline at all. I totally understand the point of this initiative, because it does suck to find a great animation but see that it’s missing some weapon type or gender that you were really hoping for. Instead of baselines, though, maybe we just use the images as templates for what animations have holes and leave it at that for people to address as they desire, without any sort of “start here” baseline.

Also, this whole project might be a better fit for a new thread, since trying to run it inside this already huge Repo thread might not be great amidst all the other posts.

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