What Is Climbing On The Sprite Sheet

If you look on the sprite sheets for all humanoids body and arms you will see a climbing animation. Is this used anywhere in game? If not does anyone know of any talk about it being used. It looks a lot like climbing a ladder to me. I tried searching for anything relating to it, but haven't found much other than ladder suggestions.

 

It is not used for anything, currently, and judging by many newer sprites not even having those frames made, it will likely not be used any time soon.
It was probably intended for ladders and perhaps those anchor chains on Avian Airships, but appears to have been either pushed way back on the priorities list or dropped altogether.

 

They planned for ladders, but movement is quite swift making ladders inferior to other movement methods. Thus they abandoned that idea.

 

they could still add it for the style, Sitting doesn't have a purpose too. And when ladders won't had a area to "stand on" even climbing would had its purpose. Especially climbing down instead of "dropping down" through various platforms and probably getting "fall damage" because of dropping a bit too deep

 

Sitting was already there. Why remove it? Climbing never was, so why add it? It is inferior to everything else. Is the added work of drawing a whole other set of sprites for every armor and clothing in the game just so someone can have those few seconds of immersion worth the time and effort? Not really.

 

yes it is, because jumping around everyhwere isn't very much immersive. And I haven't said remove sitting I just said that sitting is similarily "pointless"

 

Then we have very different ideas oh "wasted time".

There are over 330 armor/clothing sets/items, most of which require at least 8 sprites each. All would need to be done so that a handfull of people can indulge themselves in a few seconds of ladder climbing. Who, once they realize how silly it is, would go back to jumping or whatever movement method they chose, and never use ladders again.

 

cmon this isn't a high polygon 3D game where armors and its stuff can possibly glithc into each other and such. It's not that much of an effort as you describe. otherwise we woudln'T have the tons of mods by all the people out there.

 

How many add over 330 armors/clothing? Absolutely none. If you think it is so easy, then have at it.

I don't think you realize how much work it actually is.

 

I think ladders are a cool idea, but if they don't have sprites for the new sets (plus we now have elevators) I see why it was scrapped. Maybe it will come up again some day in development. Also Lazarus you are on par with that starbound knowledge every time I see you pop up I learn something new about the game.

 

elevators would be much better if they weren't a fixed lenght, intsead were build on a "rail" where the elevator moves up and down.

 

Yeah, they lack control making them hardly useful for most structures. They are either up, or down. Nothing in between.

I basically live in the assets.

 

Yeah, this isn't a high-polygon 3D game where you can apply animations to a common set of bones. Every frame of every animation of every item has to be drawn separately.

 

Yes, but the main work necessary would be arm sprites. Body sprites would be mostly copy-paste with leg edits. It would take time to do all of the missing sprites (old armors have climbing sprites already too) so that's around 200 clothing items in need of climbing sprites...

It could be done within a week or two if Chucklefish decided climbing was worth it. Adding in high-gravity planets would make climbing useful, as well.

 

I did not think about high gravity. I am currently using frackin universe so I do not know if it is in vanilla, but some planets have insane gravity that makes your jump really short.

 

I'm for the climbing, myself, but yeah, that would require not only a lot of new armor, but also how to handle controls. Should held items be disabled like with wall kicking? Should they allow sideways scaling and being able to drop off by holding the side movement, like the grates in Mario World, or should it lock you to it and only let you move up and down until you either reach the end or jump, like in Megaman? And then you get into AI pathfinding, and that's a nightmare. As much as I agree that climbing would add to the atmosphere and even allow some creative designs and make high gravity planets more manageable (I could even see it working with the tungsten chains and hanging roots/vines you get plant fiber from), it's just not very practical to implement.

Although, there could be an alternative: a rail sphere. This would let the player stick to rails that platforms and trams can and move along them, even activating detectors when they go over them. All an item like this would need is an above view of the ball instead of a side view that rotates in the direction the player moves. Then instead of having to make hundreds of new armors (and by extension, forcing modders to do the same), they could just make one item and let rails take the place of ladders. Maybe not as imersive, but from a development standpoint, it would functionally serve the same purpose and could even be fun, as well as solving that pesky high gravity problem.

 

Sounds like a modded rail hook to me.

And talking about ladders, am I the only one that want then to change the behavior of moving past "stairs" is NOT by default up but just staying on the same level and by holding W or S you walk onto the platform that leads up or down?

If there's really one thing that's unimmersive about platforms the it is that you can't not walk up onto them by default.
You have to walk then up and then jump down (trying not to fall through if there's also one below) just to stay on the same level.