Zing!

in any case I don't think I will be needing 2D sprites after all

Awww, no more isometric?

Yeah, exactly. If you move beyond the basic "each movement from one tile to another starts with the left foot and ends with the right" it truly does open a can of worms, so I'm sticking to keeping it simple. I'm pretty pleased with the walking animations I have now, so now I can move on to running...

Yeah, I'm probably just trying to find a solution that's impossible with my requirements (no sliding and same stride length -- I guess that's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole). Anyway, I've done some testing with various stride lengths and sliding, and I've found an acceptable balance.

Yeah, I think people are failing to grasp the problem here: the distance of movement is different, and the desire is for no footskate.

Precisely.

If you change the character's scale so that their stride length is ~0.5 tiles, then axis-aligned movement will take ~3 strides and diagonals ~2 strides.

I really want to avoid half of the directions using 3 strides, since that will mean I won't be able to loop the same animation (as he will then end up with the wrong leg in front), and will cause trouble when walking along a diagonal and changing directions to horz/vert (or vice versa). I guess I'll just have to find some acceptable balance between correct stride length and footskate.

Best advice is to do it properly: all movement in worldspace, then transform to screenspace. Is overall a "cleaner" way of doing it, and you can more easily see where things might be going wrong.

That's what I'm doing. That's not the problem.

You just have to animate the diagonals in the same way - feet on center of tile and edge of tile. It may look shorter, but that is just optical illusion.

No, it is shorter. The diagonal distance through a tile is ~1.4x the vert/horz distance. That's the problem.

I considered that (I'm already just moving the "walking-on-the-spot" animation), but then the character's feet will slide, as the step length of the animation won't match the actual length he's walking. It looks kinda bad. Like moonwalking.

(I didn't know whether to put this in Art or here, so I decided to place it here.)

I've run into a curious problem with an isometric game engine I'm working on. As you can see from the two below screenshots, I've got walking vertically and horizontally working fine. I've managed to get the step length to fit, so that walking to a horizontally or vertically adjacent tile fits with one full walk cycle (left foot, right foot).





However, when I try to do the walking animation for walking diagonally to an adjacent tile, I can't get the step length to fit. I tried shortening it to allow for a full walk cycle, but then it just became these funny looking baby steps. I also considered lengthening the stride, so that half a walk cycle would take the character to the next tile, but then I'd have to alternate between left foot first and right foot first, which would cause problems when having the character walking to a diagonal tile and then a horz/vert tile in one fluid movement, as he would have the wrong leg in front.

I can only imagine that most isometric games with both horz/vert and diagonal walking run into this problem. Anybody know what they do?

First of all, the site says that the game was released on September 9th. I remember checking a couple of days ago and it was NOT released. Why lie about such a minor detail? Secondly, "out of stock"?! Haha, what? How can he even call September 9th a release date when he hasn't had any stock to release?

and in literature, there are times when I like it that a line of dialogue isn't always accompanied by a facial description.

Even though a character's facial expression or current demeneaor isn't always supplied in literature, I'd argue that it's most often implied. The descriptive text that literature has, but game dialogues don't have, allows readers to create a more complete mental image of the book's characters, and readers are then a able to apply their own imagined facial expressions/body language based on this. Game dialogue where there is no accompanying image is kinda like reading a play with all the stage directions missing.

Yeah, I'd love to know what's happening with Mobigame - if they're preparing legal action or not. Of course, if they are, it's understandable that they're not talking about it, I guess...

Yeah, just think about how much we "decode" facial expressions and body language in everyday life. Without that a great deal of information is simply lost. In prose you can have descriptive text that allows you to imagine these things, but in game dialogue that's not an option (well, I guess it is an option, but it would probably seem odd), so if there isn't some other way to convey this information, the text will just feel flat to me. I suppose colorful typography can convey some of this, with big red letters for angry and the like, but it's still not the same as actually seeing the facial expression of the person talking.

I think it was mentioned earlier in the thread, but the single most important thing that gets me to read dialogue text is an accompanying portrait with emotional expressions. If the face is angry, sad or happy I want to know why and thus read the text.

Really loving the art style on this. And that zoom feature is pretty neat.

I remember when I was about 10. I decided to write a horror book with a friend. We convinced my sister to draw a cool cover with a skull. I think we even managed to write five lines.

Have you considered going fully isometric, so there won't be any visual discrepancy between the characters and the world?

Exactly. That's why I was asking earlier if anything was happening on the legal side of things...

It's "don't stop don't stop the party" now.  I'm guessing the line of events was that first someone stopped "the party", and then someone managed to stop "don't stop the party."  It seems that Robert really doesn't want the party to stop, and won't stop at "don't stop "*(n+1)+"the party" to keep it from stopping before his development process has... stopped.

His forums are like a microcosm of all the annoying stuff on the internet. A bunch of unfunny memes being thrown around ad infinitum.

The only thing that truly irks me about Bob and his viral stunts is his apparent belief that he's somehow in the slightest bit original by making a metagame. As a film student, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen other students believing that they are oh so clever in coming up with an idea for a film about some film students trying to come up with an idea for a film. It's navel gazing and not interesting for anybody but themselves.

Exactly. I admire Bob for his programming skills and dedication, but that doesn't change the fact that I found the first demo utterly boring and believe that he's treating his fans in a very rude and arrogant manner.

Yeah, but you have to play through the first part again. I didn't even feel like doing that the first time -- no way I'm doing it again.