time to make a hack and use it to prove sme wrong
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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 Flasubanâs improved brigand sprite?
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Iâve 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, Iâve come up with what should be a solid plan.
First, we need to establish high-tier, high-quality âbaseline animationsâ. We do this by looking at animations in groups based on their original⌠their original⌠archetype? As an example:
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 âfighter plus swordsâ 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 âbaseline standard.â We want to âupliftâ 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.
Letâs try another example, because this one is more complex and interesting.
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 itâs relatively generic. If we were to choose something like the Dozla-zerker, it wouldnât 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 itâs 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.
However, the Hawkzerker does not have a Bow animation, while the âBarbarianâ animation does: (Made by Orihara_Saki, itâs 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 âupliftâ to the newly-improved Hawkzerkerâs 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 âTittyzerkerâ 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, letâs 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 onâŚ
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This is the process I am advocating. We create strong baseline animations within a class archetype, then we âupliftâ 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.
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, youâll likely end up duplicating other peopleâs work and end up with 2+ of the same animation.
I havenât 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. Thatâs the general idea. Iâll post more on this in the future⌠you just have to be a little patient with slow, cranky, Grandfather Klok.
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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 itâs 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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I did make a sword derzerker that someone can modify and make better if they want. I would but Iâm way too busy now.
Iâd be more than happy to make the Barbarian with a bow into the Hawkzerker model, as the guy who gave it Lances. Since itâs just a basic model change, and not an entirely new animation, Iâm confident it shouldnât be an issue. itâd also solve an issue with my character chart
Slight aside, I still love my Lancezerk, itâs probably the dumbest concept Iâve ever created but itâs just so sweet.
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Ive actually started the bow hawkzerker. May take me a couple more days, but it will be done soon.
But as Klok said, I wonât 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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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. Iâm 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 youâre 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.
Your Lancezerker is badass.
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Yeah? Thatâs⌠pretty much what I said. Even then, Hawkzerker > Yetizerker. Theyâre fundamentally different animations, IMO, but Hawkzerker is just so much smoother and much more interesting to look at.
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Let people make what they want to make.
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(as long as it follows the siteâs rules)
Yes. Nothing inappropriate, obviously. But placing limits or discouraging people from making or submitting animations because they donât use the preferred âbaselineâ is silly and needlessly limiting.
We should be fostering a community where people can be creative and submit what theyâd like without having to worry if theyâre using what a few people label as âpreferredâ. I like the OG berserker because it is very vanilla GBA and has that choppiness I find charming. It may not be âBetterâ 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. Itâs amazing we have this and we shouldnât 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 peoplesâ animations to determine what is âpreferredâ will not create good feelings or foster the environment we should be.
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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 âberserkerâ compared to just slamming an axe.
I think Pandan has a point though. Itâs 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 itâs 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 âstart hereâ 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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I agree - we shouldnât say âyou canât submit to the repo unless itâs Xâ, but if a group of animators are interested in this initiative, they should take it on.
My issue isnât the idea itself, but rather the potential of restricting what goes into the repo for it. It should be an add on, and an additional initiaitve surrounding filling out gaps is great if people want to take it on. But if people want to make a bunch of similar anims that donât fill in these gaps, then they should be allowed to submit and share if thatâs what they want to work on.
All in all, it should be fun.
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Sounds good, although thereâs no way I could just drop what Iâm doing and wait a week to make more stuff. Making things is pretty much my only pastime nowadays.
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So, nothing youâve said was what I said. Youâre putting words into my mouth I never once uttered. Fairly disingenuous. This is about bridging gaps, not limiting what people submit. Not once did I ever say that, and I donât appreciate the twisting of my intentions.
Yeah, and this is perfectly fine. I never once said âdonât submit things that donât conform to this project.â I only said, âdonât jump the gun and start submitting for this project just yet, otherwise people are probably going to end up duplicating their efforts.â
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Thatâs my fault - I misunderstood your intent based on how I read it.
Apologies.
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Two things, first if anyone does feel like adding to the project then it might be interesting to just bring it up here that weâre working on a prototype, so if someone else has something we can either piggyback off their current work or give concepts to theirs. Yknow, cooperation and all that. says the guy that hates social interaction I mostly say that because Iâm certain people that are similar to me canât help themselves when they get a cool idea, and immediately go to do whatever it is that theyâre interested in.
speaking of doing stuff on impulse, lance boye in progress, might take till sunday thou
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