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[QuaziGNRLnose]

Well, i tend to program a lot of stuff and most of the time i don't end up finishing it. I have an obsession with getting the characters and objects and stuff to animate through the engine really nicely. I guess the stuff in yoshi's island made an impression on me and i couldn't shake the feeling that everything 2d has GOT to have some dynamic behaviour. So i continuously look for ways to make the stuff in my games/engines animate nicely through the engine itself, and i can't help but feel this in itself is some form of artistic expression regardless of how obscure it is. It's not appreciated enough when compared with tradition animation.

So, guys... how about we make this a thread for this strange unrecognized artform. post your examples from your favourite games, your own games, or post the engines themselves!

[ink.inc]

Define 'dynamic behavior'.

[biomechanic]

Better yet,

[...] post your examples from your favourite games, your own games, or post the engines themselves!

so we know what you're talking about.

[QuaziGNRLnose]

yoshi's island does it a lot like i said

past 3:40 in that video theres a lot of stuff that makes use of programming rather than predrawn stuff, it's dynamic in the sense that for example, the boss at 4:30 is a strange mass that can be affected.

its hard to define, it's just cool behavior/nice animation that comes from more than just the way the graphical frames are drawn. things had to be designed a specific way.

doesn't have to be 2d either.





starcraft 2 has a few cool things like the awesome looking tentacle effect they use.

can be tricks with textures, model morphing; really just anything unique in a game, that you haven't seen before. Something that when you first saw it you thought "i wonder how they made it work like that."

Something that goes beyond the trope of games using simple pre-recorded animation or simple behavior.

[Theophilus]

Uhhh

I never wonder how stuff like this works

In the yoshi's island video, they mostly scale the sprites up or angle them.

[Kramlack]

Dynamic animation is the worst thing to ever happen to the art community.

[ink.inc]

Perhaps not the worst thing, but the aesthetic does looks cheap when done wrong. However, if you remember Odin Sphere, all the sprites were merely contorted/streched dynamically via the game engine, and yet achieved a pretty awesome look:





And here is an example of a sprite sheet from Odin Sphere:

[Zaphos]

Yoshi's Island is pretty great.

If dynamic animation includes everything controlled by a dynamic or procedural system, then pretty much all physically-based animation is included in that ... in animated movies and some games, this includes water and smoke and hair and fur and jiggly meat cubes and so on.  Which is neat.  It's a pretty broad thing though, then.

Gish was basically designed around dynamic animation.

Physically based human animation gave us sumotori dreams, which I love, though it's maybe not the type of thing you were thinking of.

Spore creature animation is a big procedural system for apply artist animations to new/unseen creatures.

[Kramlack]

@John: You're absolutely right. However, I'd say Odin Sphere (or any games done by that developer) are some of the few exceptions. When done with pixelated sprites, it leaves terrible looking stray pixels giving off a static effect, and when used with vector based art, as you said, it looks cheap.

An example I like to use is the Genesis Sonic games vs. the GBA Sonic games. The original Genesis ones were cleaned up and nice looking when doing rotations (loops), but the GBA versions opted out for the dynamic form of it, and it just looked awful.

[Zaphos]

That reminds me, there's ton of great vector-y dynamic animation in vectorpark's stuff:
http://www.vectorpark.com/

[McMutton]

All of the Ouroboros creatures in RE5 were extremely impressive. I'd heard that it was mostly done using a shader.

[gimymblert]

Most 3D modern animation is dynamic, the dynamic feet planting, look, aim is essential for gameplay.

[QuaziGNRLnose]

Yea, you're totally right about the meat cubes etc.

Paper doll animation *can* look terrible, but some games pull it off really well like muramasa and super robot wars. a big part of it i think is having multiple frames at the same time as the rotation scaling etc.





the attack animations look reaaally sweet

[baconman]

I know apart from a couple of awkwardly positioned anims in it (due to engine limitations), most of Aquaria is breathtakingly gorgeous for using so much of that. I suppose it helps that it's in hi-res vector _{^ raster} art, and flows smoothly so it doesn't jerk around (IE: that feeling of cheapness described above usually comes from that).

I'm thinking of doing something lightheartedly simple and similarly as well in my main long-term project, focusing on a limited abstract spritesheeting scheme that uses actual animation principles (which is now 72 frames per character big, because I think adding up/down walking is practically essential to overall gameplay design; still kinda torn on diagonal walking anims that would bring it up to 80 per character). They're getting timelined for sets of actions, and then layered with a blur/smear set both to accent them, and differenciate offensive hitboxes (the blurs) from the defensive ones (the main sprites). Most of the frames are pretty straightforward, and their differences are primarily aesthetic; but a few things like rolling/tumbling or crawling/climbing/swimming can be rotated for directional emphasis. It also has a monkeybar animation that can be flipped for a handstand one, too.

Either way... 30-some-odd characters (or as many as 48) means this will still be a LOT of work to do; and I'd still have to find a way to cross-code GM's timelines together... a command would trigger not only the character physics, but also an image index/transform sprite timeline for the animations, and a second one for the blurs and their relative scale/locations. I can't just reposition them on larger characters, because I still have to compensate for hitbox range.

It's gonna be great once it's done! But right now, I'm working on minimalistic gameplay-oriented prototyping. And stayin' alive.

[Inane]

Aquaria is raster art, not vectors...

[Ego_Shiner]

I'm surprised nobody's brought up the super robot wars games. they consistently do stuff like this really well.
edit: A BLOO BOO

[Kramlack]

Paper doll animation *can* look terrible, but some games pull it off really well like muramasa and super robot wars. a big part of it i think is having multiple frames at the same time as the rotation scaling etc.