Greetings Starbound faithful, I've come to this edge of space to inquire on the specifics on how Starbound handles certain animations. I am currently working on a new species with it's own set of unique equipment and tiers. I have several neat species ideas that would push my limits in how to screw with the game but let's start simple. I have this biped race I created for a forum game long ago called Pomtosians. It is a bat winged, fox tailed, digitigrade, parasitic creature with a pom slapped on for cuteness. I have planned out much of what is needed to get a functioning race going, but there are several fine details I'm not sure about. 1) Heads and Hair -The run cycle for the -tosian has it lunge forward and run with the wing arms pulled back a bit. This means the head more or less leans forward. I noticed the head sprites in Vanilla are generally applied universally and that the humanoid file lists the head having a displacement. Rather than having the head suddenly tear off the body, an 'easy' way would be to add sprites that animate with the movement cycles. -Am I able to add additional head sprites to the head sheet and label them so that they animate in a manner similar to the body sprites? Is there a code to enable this? -What exactly does malehead.frames mean? It isn't like the other text files. -Am I able to animate hair similar to the above? 2) Sprite Expansion -I know of an attempt to create HD sprites here on the forums in the past, however it generally won't work as the game appears to scale sprite size with literally creature size. -Assuming I do not over-enlarge sprites, how does collision detection work? -Would a longer character, such as a quadruped, have a larger 'foot' zone than a humanoid or would they be forced to use the same 'foot zone' of that of a biped? 3) Additional Sprite Layers -Starbound appears to use an overlaying system for the sprites wearing clothes and such. A nice and neat system true. -Can Starbound add additional layers, such as an independent tail layer or other such additions? Or is there a hardcoded limit? I thank you for your assistance. Let's make great mods together.
The only thing I know is that kawa (or cat race author if i spelt her name wrong) didn't add a tail to her race because it causes collision, so assuming that it means the races collision is based on the texture size possibly, I'm running on 0 fuel right now (been up about 28-30 hours) when I get back up I'll crack down on the game files and find the collision data if I can, I'll post any findings I come across, best of luck and that sprite is adorable as all can be.
She's obviously fixed the issue since tails are now included in her race, just woke up, messing with the starbound files Ill keep an eye out for collision info.
Heh nice. I'm looking into if heads and hair can be animated or treated a bit like the body sprites. No big hopes there but if it works out, well all the better as my options just expanded.
I did a little test trying to imitate body animation to apply to the head animation. Apparently it doesn't work, head becomes invisible. Unless someone else figured it out I'm crossing that out of my to-do list.
You sure you set up the frames correctly? A big problem with trying any custom animation set-up for a new race is that the game will try to render all the other races in the same way. Did you find a way for it to treat your race in particular differently?
I partly anticipated the universal bit and tried to limit it to a single race by having said head treated like a body in terms of animation capability. It didn't work out. Basically I just expanded the human male head sprite and added some test images and assigned them as running sprites in the code. This turned the head invisible on all states. I didn't do anything in detail, just to see if the code governing the body is applicable to the head. I'm not even sure what the malehead.frames file means with regards to what it has included inside. It obviously references frame regions, but I can't tell for what reason. In the various code dedicated to animation and behaviors with races, much of the head code is applied via offsets or repositioning, however this code is universal for all playable races. If I could even somewhat get the game to utilize multiple head sprites for each state (running, walking, jumping) then I'm solid. If I can get them to animate, all the more better as I had an idea to utilize the facial hair system to allow modifications to other parts of the body.
Theres alot of generalized mechanics going on with races currently, several people are trying to make race specific teleportation colors but its not possible because we cant work with the very base code of the game. You might have to put animations that are specific to your race on the back burner until the mod api chucklefish is talking about is released
Much of the code in place now is a good lesson in pre-planning on adding new elements without significant back editing. I do hope being able to be more flexible comes in around the future. I'd still not rather make a race using the default sprite proportions. I don't see challenge in that so much.
Just as a comment...I love this race you created. So cute! Just wondering, but did you take any inspiration from the iconic Moogle species from the Final Fantasy series? Just wonderng, because my first thought was "Moogle!" Mainly because of the fox-like attributes, the bat wings, and especially the big, red pom atop its head. x] I would love to see the finished sprites, just out of genuine curiosity. Ehm...apologies if my post is a little off-subject.
Hmm, I could have sworn I saw somewhere that defined how long each animation frame for the body was used for along with a lot of other stuff regarding humanoid rendering, but I can't find it now, so I'm not sure if it wasn't just a product of a fevered imagination.
Hehe, partly. I found the hanging pom cute and for the sake of the story the forum game I was part of, I turned it into a parasitic organism from space that falls from the sky and latches to an unfortunate victim. Not being grimdark or anything, cause the overall story I made was more akin to light comedy and explaining why a creature would look so cluttered with all these different attributes. It was a fuuun forum game . Because of the whole space origin and their tech-savvy nature, I felt they'd fit well into Starbound. This is true. For arms, body, many things in fact there are pieces of code that tell the game specifically how they animate. Sadly this does not apply to the head. A slight shame, yes. I'm currently working on spriting and getting code to work in preparation for future attempts. This race is possible, just very difficult to make look right.
